Autoethnography as Pedagogical Strategy to Understand Subsistence Consumers

Premier management institutes in India often lack the inclusion of issues that negatively impact marketing system outcomes and the appropriate pedagogical strategies in their marketing curricula, with some exceptions. In these institutes, students, a culturally homogenous group, are far removed from the life worlds of subsistence consumers and cannot relate to them, creating pedagogical challenges for instructors. To address this, we introduced ‘autoethnography’ complemented by research-based exercise of ‘students graphies’ as pedagogical strategy in our Rural and Inclusive Marketing (RIM) course. Autoethnography legitimizes personal experiences as a knowledge source. The course seeks to sensitize students toward subsistence consumers from rural India, who comprise 65% of the Indian population. We integrated the socio-culturally situated life experiences of both instructors and students as sites for knowledge creation. We propose this strategy as a macromarketing pedagogy to understand ‘macro’ wicked problems, such as poverty and inequality, through the ‘micro’ lens of the lives of subsistence consumers. Qualitative findings indicated increased awareness and sensitivity among students toward subsistence consumers and their issues. However, students also highlighted the subjectivity of individual life experiences as a limitation of this strategy. We finally offer ways in which autoethnography can be used as a pedagogical strategy to increase awareness about wicked problems and improve the outcomes of the marketing system.