The Cultural Knowledge Perspective: Insights on Resource Creation for Marketing Theory, Practice, and Education

Marketing researchers and marketers have long focused on the importance of resources: organizations having enough raw materials, advertising budget, distribution and supply facilities, data, technology, money, connections, time, or employees. However, these only become valuable to the organization when people identify them as potential resources and then use them adeptly. In this conceptual paper, we argue that understanding the process of identifying and creating resources is essential to understanding organizational success. We introduce the Cultural Knowledge Perspective. The perspective refocuses attention on the process by which people use and extend their cultural knowledge to identify latent materials, materials that have resource potential, and the process by which cultural knowledge is used to activate latent materials to create actual resources. We bring together and build on disparate research in marketing, sociology, and management to show the importance of understanding how the cultural knowledge of marketers and consumers is deployed for resource creation. In doing so, we show how this perspective opens avenues for hiring marketing talent, product development, marketing communications, and marketing education.