Megamarketing: The Creation of Markets as a Social Process

Drawing from institutional theory in sociology, this article theorizes the process of “megamarketing”—defined by Kotler (1986) as the use of strategic efforts by a firm or firms to gain the cooperation of multiple stakeholders—to understand how new industries are created and sustained in a complex social and political context. The author uses an analysis of the casino gambling industry to demonstrate the role of normative and regulatory structures in facilitating the adoption and eventual acceptance of an industry through the social process of legitimation. In a quantitative and qualitative content analysis of 7211 newspaper articles from 1980 to 2007, the author finds that frames such as crime, business, and regulation change over time and that these frames are used by multiple stakeholders to structure normative conceptions about the practice of casino gambling. These findings contribute to a theoretical understanding of market creation and development over time and provide marketing managers with the conceptual tools for megamarketing in any industry.