Envisioning and Developing Sustainable Enterprise

Catching the Vision

While attending the May 2005 Macromarketing Conference in St. Petersburg, Florida, I was stunned when one of the panelists at the final session of the conference gave a simple response to the question: “What is the future of marketing?” This panelist, Cliff Shultz, who was then the editor of the Journal of Macromarketing, confidently asserted “the future of marketing is macromarketing” (Shultz 2005).

Macromarketing—taking a systems view of the interplay between marketing and society—has had a rich history of scholarship since 1976 with numerous scholars contributing meaningfully to understanding the role of marketing in society over the years. However, to my mind, macromarketers up to that time appeared to be satisfied with scholarship alone and had little interest in the practical aspects of market success for businesses. I had even heard second hand that one of the former editors of the Journal of Macromarketing had said at a conference once that “if the content of a paper had managerial relevance, then it wasn’t macromarketing.”

“Macromarketing” still is not a word accepted by Microsoft Word’s spell checker. So, when Cliff made his assertion, it struck me as a deep paradox—how could the ivory tower move to the mainstream of marketing practice? Yet, I instinctively knew he was right. Since then, business persons have increasingly sought answers for how to approach new complexities of the marketplace that macromarketers have studied over the years.

I wrote Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach to explain how businesses can benefit by taking a more holistic approach to the marketplace. This book is intended to help business persons, students, and scholars tap into the wisdom accrued in macromarketing scholarship over three decades. In this way, the book is about managerial macromarketing—macromarketing for sustainable enterprise.

In 2009 and 2010, I taught a new marketing and society course to MBA students at the University of Wyoming called Marketing, Markets, and Society. Unlike other schools, all of the students had to take the course because it was required. This experience proved uniquely valuable, because with all students in the course many doubts and reservations about “going green” were expressed by students. These students instinctively knew that profits had to be made for businesses to continue operations and many sustainability-related issues about including stakeholders in planning and being mindful of equity issues did not come with explanations about how the bottom line would be affected. At that time, no books existed to address this issue of how to operate in the marketplace with a social conscience and achieve profits. I have written this book to help business persons, teachers, and students better understand how this can be done.

The Book

Throughout the book, I have woven a theme of entrepreneurship—identifying and developing opportunities, regardless of the resources available. In this way, the book focuses on enterprise, rather than “business as usual.” For this reason, I believe most readers will find the contents of this book refreshingly different.

I composed Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach as a trade book with extensive citations for my MBA students. However, the book is classified in the publishing realm as a textbook because each chapter includes four sets of questions and a complete set of ancillaries accompanies the book. Because the reviewer of my chapters, Laura Wespetal (my university’s top English major in the 2012 graduating class), had never taken a business course, all terms introduced in the book are explained. This was lovingly—although painstakingly done. In this way, the book should be accessible to undergraduates across the campus as well as to practitioners.

Part 1 presents and explains macromarketing as a valuable frame for understanding what is occurring in marketplaces today. Part 2 explains factors contributing to market dynamism today, such as empowered consumers, collaborative relationships, and globalization. Part 3 gives special attention to issues related to the natural environment. Part 4 discusses issues related to equity, such as developing markets, and poverty alleviation. Part 5 sets a primary theme of the book—entrepreneurship—into perspective. On the website supporting the book (www.sagepub.com/peterson), I have included an actual business plan from a sustainable entrepreneur. The plan is not merely a checklist. It offers readers a more complete understanding of the thought and effort that goes into a successful business plan—especially the figures and tables.

The table of contents for Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach is as follows:

Each chapter of the book begins with a vignette featuring a living protagonist facing a real-life challenge related to marketing and society. In this way, the human aspect of business emerges. Each chapter closes with a mini-case called “Mavericks Who Made It” featuring an entrepreneurial figure. Some of these come from history. Some come from realms other than modern business. However, each should lead readers to reflect more effectively on the content of the chapters. Questions follow both the opening vignette and the Mavericks Who Made It mini-cases.

Ancillary materials for instructors using this book are posted at www.sagepub.com/peterson. These include (1) PowerPoint slides, (2) complete test bank with answers, (3) recommended Harvard Business School cases, (4) additional short readings to supplement the book content, and (5) the author’s blogging on sustainable enterprise. SAGE Publications did not require the creation of these ancillaries, but I chose to create these in order to boost adoptions for the book in classrooms around the world. I really want my text to encourage teachers and students to use macromarketing concepts to help invent the future of firms. Although it took me months to do, I created all of these ancillaries myself to ensure quality.

Positioning the Book

Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach will best match courses being fielded now with sustainability in the title. Such courses might be titled “Sustainable Enterprise,” “Sustainable Business,” and “Sustainable Marketing.” But because this book addresses timely issues in the environment of the firm, it can be used in a variety of courses, including Marketing and Society, Business and Society, and a forward-looking Marketing Strategy course.

At the 2011 American Marketing Association’s Winter Educators’ Conference held in Austin, Texas, leading scholarly thinkers in the realm of marketing strategy participated in a special session addressing the past successes and the future of marketing strategy scholarship (Varadarajan 2011). Generally, the scholars defined marketing strategy as explaining firm behavior when firms deploy their marketing resources for the purpose of increasing the firm’s competitive advantage over competing firms. When I heard this, I understood better why Cliff Shultz might assert that “the future of marketing is macromarketing.”

Speakers at this special session on marketing strategy confirmed the relevance of macromarketing to marketing strategy. For example, Kay Lemon of Boston College observed that marketing strategy had done well in the past by linking marketing actions to other functional areas of the firm and by bringing marketing back into the boardroom. However, understanding and measuring the effects of marketing in the long term on all stakeholders was now in need of development.

While not explicitly citing macromarketing, other scholars, such as Raji Srinivasan of the University of Texas at Austin, echoed the need for marketing strategy scholars to better understand issues that can be perceived when using a broad lens to view markets. Major phenomena of interest for these scholars included (1) a changing competitive environment, which features new players—such as Google, Facebook, and state-owned enterprises—and an increased role for government in markets after 2008; (2) digital convergence, which makes industry boundaries more fuzzy—such as those between software, entertainment, research, the Internet, and telecom; (3) emerging markets; (4) the marketing of green technologies; and (5) impoverished subsistence marketplaces, which account for more than five billion people. In sum, both Lemon and Srinivasan saw a broadened and long-term view as being important to marketing strategy in the future. A broadened and long-term view is part of integrating wisdom into business decisions. These views are also important elements of a macromarketing approach.

The Future of Marketing Is Macromarketing

In summary, I believe that business and business scholars are now in a new era. The future has arrived, and it includes macromarketing in the mainstream of marketing. To me, societal shifts to become information-focused, networked, and globalized have now brought macromarketing ideas into discussion for the private, public, and civic sectors.

As sustainability becomes a megatrend for business as quality and IT have become megatrends of business (Lubin and Esty 2010), macromarketing thought can become more mainstream. Macromarketing offers more than thirty years of scholarly dialogue about issues relevant to business now, such as quality of life, ethics, the environment, systems thinking, history of marketing, and poor countries. These six dimensions comprise the acrostic “QUEENSHIP” featured in the first chapter of Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach. As in a chess game, I believe that macromarketing offers scholars and firms reason to make the effort of comprehending patterns across the entire board, because with the queen piece, scholars and firms gain the ability to maneuver across the entire board. For this reason, the queen piece adorns the cover of the book.

Len Berry of Texas A&M University has pointed out the importance of books in his development as a marketing educator.

I have tried to distill valuable streams of macromarketing thought into a small package for readers. In this way, I have tried to make macromarketing’s body of knowledge accessible to a wider audience than those with current awareness of the Journal of Macromarketing and with subscription access.

My hope for the book is that it will contribute meaningfully to the development of more sustainable businesses and more mainstream activity for macromarketing in business scholarship and teaching. It cannot do this without readers and teachers taking the ideas of the book they find useful and applying them in their own work. This means initiating courses using Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach as a core text. This also means using the book as a tool in scholarship, as well as business. I look forward to being part of these endeavors in the future as a scholar, teacher, and as an entrepreneur.

Behind the Scenes

A number of business persons and scholars proved to be encouraging in my research and writing efforts for Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach. Costco Wholesale CFO Richard Galanti and Costco Wholesale Senior Vice President for E-Commerce & Publishing Ginnie Roeglin were two of the first business persons to grasp what a book like this could contribute to the sustainable enterprise movement. As a result of Ginnie’s willingness to advance sustainable business practices around the world, several Mavericks Who Made It mini-cases come directly from the pages of The Costco Connection. In this way, readers can gain a richer understanding about a sustainable enterprise, such as Costco, and its collaborative partners. During my research for the book, Costco’s Director of Corporate Sustainability Karen Raines provided valuable perspective regarding the development of sustainable business practices at Costco.

Lisa Myers who heads Patagonia’s environmental grant program was another business person who boosted the research involved in writing this book. Lisa willingly shared her time and perspectives on the environmental movement and stood ready to field questions from me any time. Patagonia’s story is an important one among sustainable enterprises and I appreciate Lisa’s help in explaining key parts of it to me during a visit to Patagonia’s headquarters in Ventura, California, in February 2011.

I have also appreciated the encouragement of the College of Business at the University of Wyoming and my colleagues in the Management and Marketing Department. John Mittlestaedt beta-tested the first ten chapters of the book in his Sustainable Marketing class in Fall 2011. As well, the thoughtful comments of the reviewers for the proposal and the chapters of the book helped shape this book to be what it has become. Although anonymous to me, I could tell that some reviewers had extensive backgrounds in macromarketing. Their comments were invaluable in finding the right focus on topics included (and those chosen to be excluded) from the book.

The team at SAGE Publications led by Pat Quinlan helped this project come to life and allowed the book to retain its form after I delivered the first drafts of the chapters. Although it has the same number of chapters as originally proposed, I shrug my shoulders now as I must admit that the book is more than twice as long as what I promised to write for publication. (My defense is this: Something just came over me!) I am very grateful to have a publisher like SAGE who would understand that attempting to do something that had never been done before—rendering the scope of macromarketing thought to the micro level—would take more examples and more explaining for an author to do.

Finally, Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach is dedicated to all macromarketers—past, present, and future. Thank you for daring to take a “big-picture view” of the marketplace and sharing it with others.