Journal of Macromarketing

Drawing on the phygital experience framework and integrated well-being dimensions, this paper conducts a systematic literature review of 75 conceptual and empirical studies across banking, insurance, and fintech. It addresses two research questions: What artificial intelligence (AI)-based enablers are used in financial services interactions from employee and customer perspectives? How are phygital experience constructs operationalized in the literature and linked to employee and customer well-being outcomes? The review aimed to identify how AI influences the phygital experience and how this subsequently affects employee and customer well-being. This paper extends existing frameworks, offers a typology of AI-based enablers, and proposes a research agenda. The findings show that AI increasingly acts as a third agent that shapes affective, cognitive, and relational outcomes in service ecosystems, thereby transforming customer and employee dynamics. Strategic recommendations are provided for marketers, managers, and researchers navigating the evolving financial services landscape.

Digital retail environments excel at personalization but fragment shared experience into atomized realities. Physical retail provides common context but remains static and non-adaptive. This commentary argues that phygital design offers a synthesis: adaptive responsiveness within shared physical space. By integrating digital capabilities into physical environments, phygital retail can personalize experience while preserving social affordances essential for collective coordination. We develop this argument through the case of sustainable consumption, where phygital systems can make aggregate behavior visible, activate social norms, and narrow the intention-action gap. We conclude by outlining research directions for this emerging market-shaping infrastructure.

This paper addresses a wicked problem in algorithmic consumer culture, as originally theorized by Rittel and Webber and applied to macromarketing by Wooliscroft: AI-enhanced personalization systems, designed to serve consumer preferences, frequently undermine the consumer agency that constitutes the foundation of market emancipation. We adopt Laczniak and Murphy's conception of socially responsible marketing as marketing practice that prioritizes stakeholder welfare, ethical conduct, and societal benefit over narrow firm interests. Drawing upon authenticity theory, Nissenbaum's contextual integrity framework, an updated privacy calculus framework, psychological reactance theory, and posthumanist perspectives on human-AI relations, we develop the Consumer Emancipation Framework (CEF) to explain when AI liberates consumers and when it oppresses them. The framework identifies two competing pathways. The Emancipatory Pathway operates when algorithmic transparency is high, relationship authenticity is preserved, and privacy-personalization tension remains low; under these conditions, AI amplifies consumer agency by reducing information asymmetry and enhancing autonomous choice. The Oppressive Pathway activates when transparency is absent, authenticity is violated, and privacy costs exceed personalization benefits; here, AI degrades consumer agency through manipulation, surveillance, and dark patterns that exploit cognitive vulnerabilities. We introduce three constructs essential for understanding consumer welfare under algorithmic governance: algorithmic transparency, relationship authenticity, and privacy-personalization tension. Seven propositions specify boundary conditions, with particular attention to how algorithmic literacy, consumer vulnerability, and structural inequalities moderate these relationships. Following Sharma et al. multi-level framework for socially responsible consumption, we map these constructs onto consumer-centric, firm-centric, product-centric, and consumption-centric dimensions, demonstrating how micro-level agency dynamics produce macro-level market system consequences. The framework addresses distributional consequences, recognizing that the Global South and marginalized populations may systematically experience the Oppressive Pathway due to algorithmic bias, digital literacy constraints, and colonial data extraction patterns. Drawing on Bauman's analysis of moral dilemmas under liquid modernity, we theorize how fluid techno-human landscapes destabilize traditional frameworks for evaluating AI's impact on consumer welfare. Policy implications address algorithmic accountability and corporate digital responsibility (CDR), specifying institutional conditions necessary for AI to fulfill its emancipatory potential. The paper contributes to macromarketing theory by engaging AI as a wicked problem requiring ongoing navigation rather than definitive solution, consistent with the field's tradition of addressing complex market-society interactions.

Future food technologies (FFTs) are reconfiguring food provisioning by introducing new product choices, increasing efficiency, and promoting sustainability. However, as FFTs become more agentic, they also surface paradoxical tensions between consumers, producers, and technological infrastructures. This study examines what these paradoxes do: how tensions enacted in consumer discourse constitute the ongoing shaping of FFT-mediated food provisioning markets. Drawing on qualitative data from 24 focus groups (n = 117) in Aotearoa New Zealand, we show how paradoxical tensions constitute market shaping across three areas: (1) algorithmic governance of market choices, (2) corporate dominance in market access, and (3) legitimizing frameworks for market evolution. While FFTs promise optimized, “perfect” food experiences and new forms of market access, they simultaneously constitute predefined autonomy, imbalanced participation, and constrained agency through algorithmic standardization, corporate consolidation, and exclusionary market practices. Applying paradox theory, we show how participants’ discursive practices perform institutional work that keeps FFT markets under continuous negotiation. These tensions are therefore generative rather than merely disruptive, constituting the ongoing configuration of technology-mediated food provisioning systems. This research contributes to macromarketing by showing how paradoxical tensions do not simply accompany FFT market evolution but organize the discursive and institutional work through which food provisioning systems are assembled, contested, and reconfigured. The findings offer insights for policymakers, industry stakeholders, and scholars examining the evolution of food systems in technology-mediated markets.

Sustainability-oriented markets increasingly depend on environmental communication to coordinate trust, legitimacy, and responsible exchange. However, the fast expansion of sustainability claims across digitally mediated markets has intensified concerns regarding greenwashing and declining informational reliability. Existing research predominantly explains greenwashing as either deceptive corporate communication or a consumer perception outcome, offering limited understanding of the broader informational conditions that weaken sustainability-oriented market systems. To address this gap, the present study reconceptualizes greenwashing as a condition of sustainability signal failure, where sustainability claims lose their capacity to reliably communicate substantive environmental commitment. Using signaling theory, institutional theory, and macromarketing perspectives, this study introduces sustainability signal diagnosticity as a core explanatory mechanism reflecting the inferential reliability of sustainability communication. The study further develops a configurational framework explaining how structural signal deficiencies, interpretive processes, and institutional conditions interact to undermine informational integrity within contemporary marketing systems.

As the first goal of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), poverty (SDG 1) is increasingly experienced as a polycrisis, wherein interconnected crises compound and amplify one another. Income shortfalls, in particular, intersect with digital exclusion, food insecurity, housing instability, health shocks, and learning loss, producing reinforcing disadvantages that standard, siloed interventions rarely interrupt. This commentary advances a macromarketing argument that phygital solutions, defined as the deliberate integration of physical and digital resources to deliver solutions that function across systems, can help address poverty's polycrisis when design priorities shift from adoption to inclusion. The commentary proceeds in four parts. First, the discussion clarifies the distinctive value of commentary as a genre in a field where empirical and review formats often lag fast-moving contextual disruptions. Second, the discussion situates poverty's polycrisis using current global evidence across digital access, education, employment, food, health, and housing while foregrounding the rise of urban poverty alongside the persistence of rural poverty. Third, the discussion consolidates contemporary phygital scholarship and develops a macromarketing model of inclusive phygital solutions to alleviate poverty polycrisis. Fourth, the discussion synthesizes the argument and offers action-oriented directions for policy, practice, and research.

This article examines contemporary sustainability discourse as it is visually and spatially constructed in everyday consumption settings through marketing practices. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard's concepts of simulacra, simulation, and hyperreality, the study approaches sustainability not as a reference to material environmental conditions, but as a system of signs-meanings that produce and circulate through packaging, shelf arrangements and retail space. Using semiotics and geosemiotic methodological analysis of 290 images of packaging, supermarket shelves, and aisle arrangements in four retail stores, the article shows how narratives of “naturality simulacrum”, “pureness simulacrum”, and “ethical narrative simulacrum” are assembled and stabilised within retail spaces. These visual and spatial arrangements enable the narrative of sustainability to circulate largely at the level of representation, shaping how environmental responsibility is encountered and understood in the market. This article argues that sustainability in contemporary retail space operates effectively as a self-referential regime of sing-value through which hyperreal model of sustainability is continuously produced.

This exploratory study advances the phygital customer experience literature by introducing the Digitalization Physicalization Customer Experience (DPCX) framework, to holistically examine CX in 2 phygital contexts. Qualitative insights from twenty interviews conducted with field hockey athletes and professional jazz students uncover extrinsic-intrinsic value blends (efficiency/self-actualization, hedonistic/social value, efficiency/safety value, capability/perceived effort, self-empowerment, autonomy and personalization) and highlights human connectors (service providers/instructors) and human peers (consumer connectors/students), as pivotal in shaping affective, symbolic, and utilitarian relationship bonds. Findings reveal digital tools sustain but rarely initiate strong peer bonds, while in-person interaction remains critical for emotional and sensory engagement. This research also established that the quality of efficient time-flow enhances the practicality pillar by minimizing cognitive friction and maximizing goal progression; qualities of active participation and positive valence served as essential ‘building blocks’ of the sociability pillar, creating the conditions for meaningful educational exchange in the phygital context. Similarly, across two phygital contexts, this study established that affectivity pillar can be enhanced via positive valence and heightened dimensionality; whereas sensory engagement (sensoriality pillar) can be created through rich dimensionality and novel ordinariness qualities. Moreover, immersivity pillar (seamless transition) appeared to be maintained through uninterrupted time-flow and a consistent, engaging narrative (dimensionality quality). Last, individual contextual factors (learning style, digital fluency) influence phygital touchpoint effectiveness, with sequencing alignment between digital and physical components emerging as a key success factor.

This paper proposes a novel conceptual framework, entitled The Big Five of Phygital Luxury Experience (PH-LX), to explore how the convergence of digital and physical touchpoints is redefining luxury customer experiences. Aligned with macromarketing principles and the Transformative Luxury Research (TLR) agenda, this paper proposes a novel conceptual framework, PH-LX, emphasizing luxury as a catalyst for consumer well-being, ethical consumption, and societal enhancement. Rather than treating these dimensions as fixed, we identify two transformational shifts reshaping the luxury landscape: (1) the evolution of luxury from static ownership models to orchestrated, evolving customer experiences, and (2) the redefinition of channels from fixed physical spaces to dynamic, fluid ecosystems of interaction. These shifts are analyzed through a longitudinal lens of past, present, and future across five interdependent dimensions: Identity Expectations, Access Emphasis, Main Channel, Philosophy, and Revenue Drivers. Grounded in macromarketing's normative agenda for human-centric market systems, this paper introduces a forward-looking conceptual model that emphasizes luxury experience as a platform for enhancing well-being and positive societal outcomes. Our analysis synthesizes literature from luxury branding, customer experience (CX), and digital transformation to surface the opportunities and tensions emerging in phygital luxury. The framework also foregrounds societal and ethical implications, including concerns around automation, access inequality, and data privacy. We conclude by offering a research agenda and managerial pathways to enable more inclusive and future-oriented luxury experience design.

The rapid rise of hybrid consumption raises important macromarketing questions about consumer well-being. Our research, which is conceptual in nature, offers a framework that explains how hybrid sequenced solutions influence consumer well-being. Our conceptualization introduces the concept of accesship (access-dominant to ownership-dominant, including hybrid) as a complement to the concept of phygital (physical-dominant to digital-dominant, including hybrid) and develops a 2 × 2 typology defined by these two dimensions. This typology, which we term the phygital–accesship typology (PAT), comprises four quadrants represented by Streams, Tokens, Lends, and Keeps. We then examine the implications of each category for consumer well-being via the lens of three key psychological mechanisms (i.e., materialism, need for touch, and psychological ownership). We conclude by discussing the implications of our framework for firms, consumers, and policymakers and propose an agenda for future research on the interplay between accesship, phygital, and consumer well-being.

Elections are among the most consequential market-like systems in any democracy, yet macromarketing has never systematically analysed them. DeQuero-Navarro et al. argued that advancing macromarketing's understanding of market–society relationships requires interdisciplinary collaboration that broadens the field's analytical scope and extends its conceptual resources to scholars working in adjacent domains. This paper answers that call by demonstrating how macromarketing's foundational principles can be applied to political communication systems to generate analytical insights that neither political marketing nor electoral scholarship has been able to produce alone. Drawing on Mittelstaedt et al.'s foundational principles, Layton's marketing systems framework, and Meade and Nason's systems-theoretic macromarketing, the paper develops the Electoral Marketing System (EMS)—an integrated conceptual framework specifying actors, communication flows, structural moderators, emotional mechanisms, and emergent outcomes—as a pedagogical tool for applying macromarketing principles in electoral contexts. The EMS is not a parallel framework to the political marketing system literature; rather, the political marketing system is best understood as one important subset operating within the broader EMS, just as the advertising industry operates within the larger marketing system. Nigeria's 2023 presidential election illustrates the EMS framework across four temporal stages—from pre-primary antecedent forces through electoral marketplace constitution, campaign period, election event, and post-election feedback effects—demonstrating how unprecedented digital mobilisation coexisted with 26.71% voter turnout, the lowest in the Fourth Republic. The engagement-participation gap is shown to be an emergent property of the EMS rather than a failure of individual campaigns, and information disorder is identified as a systemic externality of competitive mobilisation. A five-direction research agenda and a full instructional guide for educators conclude, mapping opportunities for macromarketing scholarship in electoral contexts.

Contemporary marketing systems are facing increasing ecological constraints, active stakeholder pressures, and increasing imperatives for institutional accountability. Despite this, the dominant market logics remain heavily focused on short-term performance and profit maximization, hindering their ability to maintain legitimacy and societal trust. This article constructs a macromarketing framework centered on virtue, redefining sustainable marketing as a strategic and ethical institution integrated into democratic systems. It is grounded in the normative foundations of prudence (phronesis), justice, and integrity, which are incorporated into the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) perspective, societal marketing theory, and Aristotelian virtue ethics to ensure institutional alignment between market activity and collective welfare. The model proposed posits a series of ideas that link sustainable marketing approach, ethical governance strategies, and system-level value generation to human flourishing (eudaimonia).

Social marketing faces interconnected challenges across identity formation, educational provision, and global knowledge representation. Existing scholarship treats these as separate problems, but this paper argues they are manifestations of competing institutional logics: market logic privileging commercial orientation, academic logic rewarding methodological conformity, and public welfare logic demanding transformative social impact. Underpinning these tensions are epistemological questions about what counts as valid knowledge and whose knowledge is recognised, questions that existing frameworks have not systematically addressed. We introduce the Disciplinary Advancement Framework for Social Marketing (DAfSM), which provides analytical tools for engaging with these tensions deliberately rather than reproducing them unconsciously. DAfSM integrates institutional logics theory to diagnose competing pressures, institutional work to specify how actors create, maintain, and disrupt disciplinary structures, and reflective equilibrium as a method for iteratively navigating tensions that resist permanent resolution. Drawing on philosophical accounts of knowledge as socially situated and contextually grounded, the framework distinguishes structural exclusion from paradigmatic exclusion as two analytically separate mechanisms through which Global South and community knowledge is marginalised within the discipline. An illustrative application to the African Social Marketing Association (AfSMA) demonstrates the framework's diagnostic and generative capacity across identity, educational, and epistemic domains. The paper contributes a theoretically grounded framework that moves beyond mapping disciplinary tensions to enabling strategic engagement with them, with transferable implications for applied disciplines facing analogous contradictions between institutional legitimacy and transformative capacity.

This article advances macromarketing by introducing phygital science as a foundational paradigm for understanding integrated physical-digital ecosystems and by proposing the Human First Phygital Value (HFPV) framework as its core theoretical architecture. As physical and digital markets fuse into integrated sociotechnical ecosystems, prevailing digital transformation models; rooted in technocentric and efficiency-driven logics; are no longer adequate for explaining how value, well-being, and justice emerge in blended contexts. HFPV reframes phygital markets as dynamic systems shaped by human needs, institutional governance, cultural meaning, and technological affordances, and conceptualizes value as “poly-created” through continuous human-technology-context entanglement. The framework delineates the inputs, processes, outcomes, and systemic feedback loops that structure societal value in integrated physical-digital ecosystems, offering macromarketing a comprehensive lens for analyzing human flourishing, institutional trust, resilience, and equity at scale. By articulating a human-first orientation for phygital market design and governance, this article establishes the conceptual groundwork for a new research agenda focused on ethical AI, organizational redesign, sustainability, and cross-cultural variation in phygital well-being.

Markets increasingly operate through algorithmic systems exercising decision-making authority traditionally reserved for humans. This article develops the Algorithmic Sovereignty Framework to theorize how constitutive market authority, the capacity to determine what is visible, transactable, and choosable, redistributes across human-algorithmic assemblages in ways that challenge assumptions about market systems. We extend marketing systems theory to accommodate nonhuman agents that drive market evolution, exchange theory to theorize transactions completed through algorithmic mediation beyond human comprehension, and consumer sovereignty to introduce configuration sovereignty, which concerns who determines what is choosable rather than who chooses. The framework identifies five sovereignty dimensions (cognitive, temporal, informational, relational, and normative) where algorithms determine market outcomes, and it theorizes four evolutionary phases from human-dominant through hybrid configurations toward algorithmic autonomy. The analysis also reveals four novel market failures (algorithmic lock-in, preference manufacture, sovereignty asymmetries, and temporal exploitation) that compound rather than self-correct and that traditional governance cannot address.

This study develops a typology of Phygital Customer Experience (PH-CX) business models that integrate digital and physical interactions to enhance value creation and stakeholder engagement. Drawing on the experience economy, experiential value frameworks, and business model configuration theory, the proposed typology delineates four experiential domains—escapist, esthetic, educational, and entertainment—mapped along the dimensions of digitalization and physicalization. By examining 33 global cases (2020–2025) in various sectors, the study extends business model innovation literature by conceptualizing experiential modules as dynamic, recombinatory elements. Central mechanisms include interaction and touchpoint design, iterative testing, and scalable monetization, which drive sustained engagement and multi-stakeholder value. The research links firm-level strategy with customer and societal experience through a human-centric, participatory lens, contributing to responsible innovation and digital transformation for inclusive and sustainable outcomes.

This article argues that the defining challenge of the artificial intelligence (AI) era is not technological displacement per se, but a more fundamental structural discontinuity: the progressive erosion of scarcity conditions in specific cognitive and informational domains, and the resulting destabilization of institutions still organized around the assumption of generalized scarcity. Drawing on macromarketing theory, institutional economics, and sociological perspectives on identity and meaning, I develop the concept of the Abundance Shock, a condition in which the AI-driven near-zero marginal cost of producing knowledge, content, and cognitive work undermines the foundational assumptions of market systems, labor institutions, and social identities. I identify four interdependent mechanisms through which this shock propagates: (1) production-labor decoupling, (2) identity disruption, (3) epistemic fragmentation, and (4) institutional lag. I further propose that the real scarcity of the AI age is not informational or material, but cognitive and moral, centered on judgment, trust, and the capacity to define what constitutes a good life. I conclude by drawing implications for macromarketing scholarship, particularly around the adequacy of market-based solutions to abundance-era challenges and the need for governance frameworks that foreground societal well-being over efficiency optimization.

Artificial intelligence increasingly structures how consumers search, decide, and participate in markets. Yet most AI-in-marketing research adopts a firm-centric and performance-oriented perspective, offering limited theorization of its broader societal consequences. This commentary reframes AI as a socio-technical market infrastructure that redistributes power and shapes consumer agency. Drawing on macromarketing and socially responsible marketing traditions, we position consumer emancipation as a normative criterion for evaluating algorithmic markets. We develop a conceptual framework identifying transparency, fairness, and consumer control as governance mechanisms that enhance autonomy, trust, and capability, thereby enabling more inclusive and accountable market outcomes. By shifting attention from efficiency to emancipation, the paper advances a conceptual foundation for assessing responsible AI and outlines directions for future macromarketing research on algorithmic systems.

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping how power, trust, and agency are distributed across market systems. This study examines the earliest phase of GenAI adoption, analyzing 478,232 tweets posted between November 2022 and April 2023 following the public release of ChatGPT, to understand how stakeholders negotiated autonomy, vulnerability, and control in algorithm-mediated environments. Topic modeling reveals a dual narrative in which GenAI was embraced for its creative augmentation while simultaneously prompting concern about opacity, fairness, and diminished influence. These patterns illuminate the trust-power paradox, the tension between relying on GenAI for enhanced capability and experiencing reduced agency through centralized, opaque decision structures. Drawing from these insights, we develop three conceptual models, the Stakeholder Experience Matrix, the Emancipatory Readiness Funnel, and the Ethical AI Governance Compass, which together explain how early encounters with GenAI shape conditions for stakeholder emancipation and socially responsible marketing. The study advances macromarketing scholarship by linking early public meaning making to structural mechanisms of trust, empowerment, and governance, and offers a foundation for designing AI systems that strengthen rather than constrain stakeholder agency.