Journal of Macromarketing

The Middle East / North Africa (MENA) region faces serious food insecurity, with an increasing gap between food production and consumption. Using resource advantage theory from macromarketing, we demonstrate that the agriculture / agribusiness industry would be highly competitive with economic integration of the Nile Valley (Egypt and Sudan) with the Arab Gulf countries. Individually, these sub-regions have critical disadvantages, but as a bloc, complementary strengths could make the industry quite competitive. Of course, integration within MENA has been discussed for decades, although usually as a political concept, which is unlikely to succeed in the foreseeable future. From a macromarketing perspective, economic integration is quite viable, and very beneficial to food security in the region.

A marketing systems approach to stakeholders has never been more important in an increasingly interconnected world. Recognising the inherent limitations of a firm-centric stakeholder stance, this paper proposes a dynamic stakeholders framework to examine the interacting nature of interrelated and interdependent stakeholder effects from a societal perspective. It presents a systemic stakeholders framework that incorporates several defining features and core propositions based on Layton’s MAS mechanisms and Coleman’s Boat. The contribution of a dynamic stakeholders’ marketing system framework is not so much in identifying or defining the appropriate marketing mechanisms at work but in understanding the continuous feedback nature of the macro-micro-macro everyday dynamics which stakeholders listen to, learn about and leverage to act, react and interact.

The boom generation is aging. Research has found that aging boomers are more vulnerable to mental and physical health problems and that adoption of healthy lifestyles may be a game changer for preventive health marketing to deliver health and quality of life. While Rahtz and Szykman’s (2008) model focuses on educating aging boomers with preventive health knowledge to facilitate lifestyle change, unhealthy lifestyles entrenched in the culture of the Woodstock generation may be more resistant to change. Drawing on the metaphor of cultural capital, we theorize that Counterculture lifestyles in different fields are intricately intertwined symbolic elements organized by an anti-establishment habitus and, as such, should be naturally correlated and capable of predicting one another. Data analysis confirmed that withdrawal from institutional religion as a defiant lifestyle in the spiritual field four or five decades ago is associated with alcohol excess and cigarette smoking among aging boomers in 2016. Rahtz and Szykman’s (2008) model was modified to include withdrawal from institutional religion to better understand its impact on lifestyle change, health, and quality of life. Implications for marketing preventive health to aging boomers were also discussed.

Drawing on the multi-level perspective of socio-technical change and social practice theory, this paper argues that macrosocial marketing must attend to the challenge of aggregate demand reduction in order to support transition to more sustainable marketing systems. However, reversal of current production and consumption system trajectories is a prodigious challenge. To provide deeper insight into that challenge, an ethnographic case study of a failed plastic bag tax identified the mechanisms reinforcing unsustainable marketing systems. Despite widespread awareness and espoused support, the tax failed to meet policy goals. Embeddedness of plastic bags in two inseparable practices (waste management and household provisioning) gave rise to seven themes: Valuableness, skepticism, subversion, blame, juxtaposition, ubiquity and embeddedness, rights and responsibilities, highlighting the roles of habitus and dominant technological regimes, and the notion of markets as sites of conflict. Mapping the system mechanisms highlighted regulating loops locking in systems behaviors at macro (landscape), meso (regimes of technology and practice) and micro (individual consumer and firm) levels. Building on the idea of demarketing, a process of macrodemarketing is proposed as a multi-level challenge to systems unsustainability. A series of macrosocial marketing interventions is proposed, ranging from electoral and education policy, to incentives for closed loop supply chain innovations. Addressing the limitations of the voluntary individual choice perspective, the study contributes insight into sources of resistance and potential capitulation to systems interventions at multiple levels and among multiple stakeholders.

The fashion industry is responsible for bringing some of the worst consumption practices out of individuals by reinforcing tendencies for overconsumption throughout society. Consuming too much has led to negative economic, societal, and environmental consequences. The purpose of this paper is to understand whether promoting a style orientation among consumers (rather than a fashion orientation) will lead to more sustainable apparel consumption. Data collected from 6,386 consumers across five countries that are considered to be leaders in sustainable development (Sweden, Netherlands, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S.) suggest that promoting style can be a potential solution to attain slow fashion and, thus, improve sustainable apparel consumption. We further examine the role of hedonism and materialism in influencing sustainable practices in the industry. Based on the findings, the paper emphasizes the need for the collective effort of different actors, especially the role of government, in creating a more sustainable fashion system.

This commentary is a personal account of the evolution of the concept of a marketing system, from being central to the vision of macromarketing inspiring a group of scholars nearly 60 years ago, to playing a central role today in bringing together the rich set of ideas, concepts, frameworks and concerns that are part of contemporary macromarketing thought. It provides a basis for, and indeed, argues for, the integration of both marketing and macromarketing thinking in practice and in teaching in response to the micro and macro challenges facing managers and policy makers in most human communities as they seek to find a way through increasingly complex environments shaped by physical, social, economic, and technological forces interacting though space and time at all levels of society. It was written to serve as the introduction to a SAGE Publications virtual book concerned with the past, present and future of thinking and practice related to marketing systems.