Within-country diversity

Steven Michael Burgess

Adapted from Dr Burgess's inaugural lecture as Professor of Business Administration in Marketing. The twin themes are the importance for marketing of correctly understanding consumers and their differences, and the need for businesses to take emerging consumer markets (ECMs) more seriously than they often do, drawing on examples from South Africa.

WithinCountry Diversity

Is it the key to South Africa's prosperity in a changing world?

Steven Michael Burgess The Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town

INTRODUCTION

My feelings derive from a time in my University's past. It was the early 1930s. The world was mired in the Great Depression and people generally agreed that governments should intervene. It was during those gloomy days that Professor William Harold Hutt, an economist and Professor of Commerce at the University of Cape Town, first proposed the notion of consumer sovereignty (Hutt, 1934; 1936). Hutt eschewed the primacy of government, capital, labour,...

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