Towards a Sharper “Golden Anniversary” Focus for Macromarketing?

Abstract

The future of macromarketing is in doubt should scholars not consider how our field's previous uniqueness has recently been co-opted by other marketing-oriented academic organizations. Proposed here is a new lens for macromarketing scholarship, one that is tightly focused on sustainable societal provisioning systems. Marketing systems literature, sociological research on provisioning systems and “doughnut economics” thinking collectively provide a contemporary basis for future research in macromarketing.

Introduction

Almost fifty years have passed since macromarketing scholars first gathered to exchange ideas and explore new areas of inquiry. Present almost from the beginning, actually since the third such gathering in 1978, I subsequently attended with some degree of regularity the conferences that have been held over subsequent decades. It has been a long and rewarding relationship. My perspectives on the first three decades of macromarketing have previously been chronicled (Shapiro 2006). At that time, I both anticipated and looked forward to far more European involvement in macromarketing. That expansion of macromarketing's scholarly acceptance has indeed occurred, and to a much greater degree than I expected, not only in Europe but in many other parts of the world as well.

What I have also witnessed in recent years, however, is a marked decline in macromarketing interest among North America's marketing professoriate. I first noticed this in Cleveland in 2019 and then in Seattle just last year. Though both these cities are in the United States, “rest of the world” attendance greatly exceeded that from North America. It's also worth noting that the 28 North American attendees in 2023 were skewed, very skewed, upward in age with most having a macromarketing affiliation that went back decades. Younger, early career North American attendees were few and far between.

The above leaves us with two important questions:

What lies behind this declining North American interest in macromarketing?

What can be done to reawaken North American interest and prevent a similar “rest of world” decline?

Proposal

After giving the first of these questions considerable thought, I have come up with, to say the least, an ironic answer. To some extent we are, and this of course in many respects is a most fortunate development, no longer all that different both in what we do and how we do it. Our USP (Unique Selling Proposition) is just not that unique anymore.

The circa 1960 managerial marketing takeover from the macro perspective of previous marketing textbooks has repeatedly been documented (Hunt, Haas, and Manis 2021; Wilkie and Moore 2003). This development was soon accompanied by a rapidly growing interest in consumer behavior. Though Marketing and Society voices were by no means silenced over the following fifteen years (Shapiro 2006), they received progressively less attention in marketing Ph.D programs, an obvious determinant of the journal focus of what was to follow.

Organizationally, macromarketing first took shape in the late 1970s, this soon to be followed by the establishment of the Marketing and Public Policy interest group. To the best of my knowledge, these were the only two special interest “Marketing and Society” focused annual academic gatherings which took place over the next few decades. Though the AMA's 1988 Winter Conference was in large part shaped by first generation macromarketers, its focus, “Marketing: a Return to the Broader Dimensions” expressed a hope that did not in fact materialize. Marketing matters that really matter did not immediately move to marketing's academic forefront. However, that move has indeed now occurred, powered by the twin challenges of climate change and global sustainability.

Ironically, there is now steadily growing interest among other marketing academics in exploring issues that have long been macromarketing concerns, but most are pursuing this interest independent and apart from our organization. These researchers are more likely to be affiliated with other, more recently formed groups which serve Consumer Culture Theorists, Subsistence Marketers, Transformative Consumer Researchers and Social Marketers. One even finds the American Marketing Association, a group that as recently as 2004 defined marketing in its entirety as strictly a managerial practice with no social dimension whatsoever (Gundlach 2007), now promoting “Better Marketing for a Better World”.

So, what should we do as an organization in response to the increasing interest of other groups in issues that have long been macromarketing concerns? Should we next year just declare victory after five decades of labor and then dissolve? Possibly, but that's not the course of action I am recommending. Should we instead strive for a radical transformation both of what we study and how we study it? That's not going to happen nor should it. Rather, I am advocating a three-fold approach:

First, we continue to focus on traditional areas of macromarketing concern such as the climate crisis, the challenge of global sustainability, quality-of-life issues, distributive justice, marketing and economic development and, finally, market and regulatory failure.

Secondly, we further develop what I call the” macromarketing and…” dimension of our subdiscipline whether that “and” includes social marketing, transformative consumer research, subsistence marketplaces or any of the other specialty areas identified by DeQuero-Navarro, Stanton, and Klein (2021) in the latest published macromarketing bibliography.

Finally, and most importantly, let's continue to make a truly unique contribution by using a tightly focused macromarketing lens, hopefully an increasingly powerful one, on nothing less than the nature and function of what might be called “sustainable societal provisioning systems”. Indeed, let all we do, whatever the macromarketing topic under study, be viewed using that lens and with a focus on both sustainability and social justice.

Marketing Systems Foundation

As is the case with so many other areas of marketing thought, Wroe Alderson was the first marketing scholar who seriously explored systems thinking and its potential marketing relevance (Alderson, 2006a, 2006b). The Alderson approach, however, especially his emphasis on organized behavior systems, had more of a micro or a mezzo focus than a macro one. This is in contrast to George Fisk who, long before his association with macromarketing, published his Marketing Systems text (Fisk 1967). Fisk's opening JMK editorial (Fisk 1981) reflected a continuing interest both in “how” and “how well” marketing was performing as society's provisioning technology and, of course, how that performance could be improved.

However, while the relative importance of Alderson and Fisk to systems thinking within marketing can be debated, the contemporary contribution of Roger Layton cannot. In a steady stream of articles beginning in 2007, Layton, at first alone and latterly working with others, step by step developed what most would now consider macromarketing's currently received wisdom as regards systems thinking and its relationship to provisioning systems (Layton 2007, 2019). As he further developed his thinking as regards marketing systems, Layton also paid steadily increasing attention to the broader category of provisioning systems and, more specifically, within that category to top down prescriptive (usually government driven) systems (Layton and Domegan 2021).

What might be considered the final Layton formulation as regards the nature, scope and functioning of provisioning systems can be found in a paper he co-authored with Christine Domegan (Layton and Domegan 2021). No matter the degree to which you consider yourself already familiar with Laytonian thought, I recommend a careful reading of this article. Its abstract, reproduced below, is an accurate summary but one that can only be fully appreciated after careful reading of the elaboration found in the article itself.

Pandemics, climate warming, growing inequality, and much more bring crises that change the patterns of daily life in human communities, directly impacting the provisioning systems that form in a community to meet the needs and wants of individuals, groups, and entities for goods, services, experiences, ideas. Provisioning systems sometimes begin as leadership initiated top-down, authoritarian prescriptive supply networks, public and private. Sometimes, they originate as bottom-up, self-organized, innovative, open choice, often informal, exchange based networks, and mostly, over time, they emerge as untidy self-organized multi-level diverse assemblages of both. The diversity of provisioning systems in a community enables crisis resilience, but limits efficiency and control. The provisioning systems that form in these ways are complex, multi-level, non-linear evolutionary systems, often unpredictable, and lacking direction. Balancing a desire for stability and an appetite for diversity, innovation, and change in shaping a provisioning system is like walking a narrow corridor on the edge of chaos. Achieving balance, avoiding slipping into chaos, rests on the management of a set of complex social mechanisms. These embrace delivery mechanisms where value is produced and consumed through complex infrastructures; stakeholder action fields where trust, collaboration, cooperation, compromise, competition, or conflict are in play; technology evolution mechanisms where innovation and the recombination of existing technologies occur at all levels; and value exchange fields where community and individual values shift in response to crisis and change. Recovery from crisis is not an event, it is a complex, continuing process, often unpredictable, often unequal in outcomes, but walking a narrow corridor is episodic, uncertain and in the end possible. This is the next normal for marketing. (Layton and Domegan 2022, p 4)

Other macromarketers have recently written on marketing/provisioning systems, some well within the Layton tradition (Wooliscroft 2021), others somewhat departing from it (Kadirov 2018). And what others have written before in this area is only prelude to what is certain to follow. However, at this point in time, I propose the use of Layton's final thinking as summarized in the abstract reproduced above as the macromarketing starting point for what could be a most fruitful, continuing intellectual exchange with current schools of sociological thought as regards provisioning systems. Interested sociologists studying provisioning have developed not one but rather several different, somewhat competing provisioning system theories. Fortunately, another published paper, as seminal in its own way as Layton and Domegan, summarizes these theories for us in a manner that facilitates a direct comparison with Laytonian thought.

Doughnut Economics

“Provisioning Systems for a Good Life within Planetary Boundaries” (Fanning, O’Neill, and Buchs 2020) also provides us with useful perspectives on “doughnut economics” (Raworth 2012, 2017) and how society can and must function while being both just to all and cognizant of global resource limitations. Both a closely related predecessor article (O’Neill et al. 2018) and a subsequent one (Fanning et al. 2022) attempted to measure the extent to which different nations were currently living outside either the upper (sustainability) or lower (just to all) parameters of the doughnut. All three papers strike me as required reading for macromarketers interested in further development of provisioning system thought. This is true even though the point is made in the 2020 Fanning publication that each of the six sociology-based theories discussed has its own very extensive literature with Fanning et al. providing just a brief introduction. But as well-referenced as that paper is, there are no references whatsoever to Layton's work, still further evidence, as if it were needed, of the existence of almost impenetrable interdisciplinary silos within academia.

The relationship of doughnut thinking to macromarketing's focus both on global sustainability (not collectively consuming beyond the outer skin at the very top of the doughnut) and on distributive justice (providing a level of provisioning fair to all, especially those struggling to get out of the hole in the donut) should be obvious. Thus, Fanning, O’Neill, and Buchs (2020) present us with a “two in one” gift. They not only contrast and compare the six different sociological theories of provisioning in a way that facilitates comparison to Layton's final analysis of provisioning processes. They also provide their own synthesis and put an emphasis both on “sustainable societal provisioning” and the systems that might provide it, my previously suggested future focus for macromarketing's next few decades.

Implications for the Future of Macromarketing

What's presented below is just a very limited introduction to Fanning et al., and my justification for the new lens I am advocating. But before doing this, I acknowledge the fact that at least one previously published Layton paper (Layton, Domegan, and Duffy 2022) recognized this relationship. More recently, the framework Fanning, O’Neill, and Buchs (2020) advocate was used in a paper presented at the 2023 Macromarketing Conference (Renton 2023) which studied changes over the decades in New Zealand's energy provisioning system.

After carefully reviewing a truly extensive body of literature on societal provisioning, Fanning et al. blend no less than eighteen different dimensions of this literature into six clearly distinguishable schools of sociology-based provisioning systems thought. Each school is briefly described with readers also being provided with useful follow up references. The theories in question are then each evaluated first using three systems science criteria, then with both a sustainability and a social equity/ well being measuring stick. The authors’ conclusions in this regard and what they then propose are best expressed in their own words.

We find that most of these theories fail to prioritise human needs and well-being, and do not incorporate explicit environmental limits. However, they provide important insights that we draw upon to identify six important provisioning system elements (households, markets, the commons, the state, techniques, and material stocks). Based on the theories, we also identify two important relationships between elements, namely feedbacks and power relations. We further propose the concept of “appropriating systems” as a component of provisioning systems. Appropriating systems reduce the resource efficiency of human well-being via rent extraction, and act as a barrier to meeting human needs at a sustainable level of resource use. We combine these concepts into a new framework, and discuss applications to energy systems. (Fanning, O’Neill, and Buchs 2020, p.1)

The 2020 Fanning paper only provides brief descriptions of each of the six identified theories but then identifies for each a source document providing far greater detail. Each of the six are next evaluated in in terms of their relevance to both Sustainable Resource Use (the upper limit) and Sufficient Social Outcomes (the ‘just” bottom) of the doughnut. To this observer it appears that Layton's work fits most closely into the Systems of Provision approach “which explores how each commodity or service has its own unique political economy that includes everything from resource extraction and distribution to the cultural meanings of consumption” (Fanning, O’Neill, and Buchs 2020, p. 4). However, Layton has also made reference to the work of Elizabeth Ostrom (Layton, Domegan, and Duffy 2022) who in the Fanning analysis has been assigned to a separate Socio-Ecological Systems Framework. The contribution technology makes, another favorite Layton theme, is identified as a component of yet a third alternative system.

All the above, of course, just highlights the potential of two productive areas of research, areas that could provide macromarketing with the unique focus it needs for the next few decades. Layton's work should be further developed within the context of current sociological provisioning thought. What could sociological analysis contribute to the further refinement of Laytonian thought and, just as importantly, what insights has Layton provided that sociologists would find useful? The new Fanning et al. concept (2020) of “appropriating systems” seems to merit particular attention.

Just as importantly, this further development of provisioning thought with marketing should be carried forward within doughnut economics or related thinking just as the Fanning paper advocates. In this way provisioning systems will be examined not only in terms of what is being provisioned but also as regards the extent to which such systems contribute both to global sustainability and to socially equitable distribution. In short, what should distinguish macromarketing research over the next few decades, as compared to that of all the other “marketing and society” interest groups, is its continued use, whatever the topic being studied, of a carefully focused and ever-strengthening macromarketing lens, one that magnifies all the various characteristics and dimensions of “sustainable societal provisioning” and the systems designed to provide it. Such a focus is both highly desirable in its own right and one that over time could also draw back into our ranks sufficient numbers of those now-missing younger North American scholars, while continuing macromarketing's current relevance to scholars around the world.