Journal of Macromarketing

Approaches to enhancing sustainability have largely focused on altering individual consumption behaviors. However, this focus on the individual consumer has been recently critiqued because the behavior of individuals is situated within wider socio-cultural contexts. Thus, the sustainability research agenda is shifting away from individual consumers towards understanding consumption practices, social networks, material infrastructures and organisations of various forms in which consumption is problematized and consumption choices are reflected upon and negotiated. These social spaces need to be understood if change is to be truly achieved. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in an Irish ecovillage, we examine how ecovillage members negotiate sustainable consumption at the everyday level. Analysis reveals how members of the ecovillage employ tactics that encourage reflexivity in the everyday. Specifically, these reflexive tactics work together to confront routine consumption, create alternative infrastructures that support sustainability, and foster critical engagement.

Studies on the politics of consumption often focus on identity issues and interpret particular consumer choices as political resistance. Applying Althusser’s and Williams’ theory on ideology, this study uses multiple methods of qualitative inquiry to investigate the politics of red tourism in China and to examine whether such a consumption practice can be interpreted as a political act of resistance to capitalism. A close look at red tourism suggests that it is intended to be a hegemonic tool of the government to further subordinate the country’s middle class whose inherent political agency continues to be weak. However, members of the middle class bring their own fresh concepts of consumer sovereignty to their red-tourist experiences. This study concludes that consumption, such as red tourism, reinforces both political agency and political subordination. Such a paradoxical finding suggests researchers of consumption and ideologies, such as socialism or capitalism, need to bring a nuanced approach to understanding the complex relationship between consumption and politics.

This case study explores an entrepreneurial venture as it deals with the challenges of operating in Zimbabwe, a country with high levels of poverty, limited institutional frameworks, and no national currency. It investigates how the venture has overcome institutional voids to challenge the existing monopoly, and succeeded in establishing itself, and thrived, in a contracting Sub-Saharan economy. In so doing the case has reshaped the existing marketing system by increasing competition, lowering prices, providing income for more than 2,000 people, and better quality products for the urban subsistence community. Specifically this paper looks at what resources are critical to reshaping subsistence marketing systems, and provides insights into the marketing channels and networks that have led to this change.

How we use, or do not use our natural resources is a question that has been debated for millennia. Still an answer remains out of reach. It is a complex issue that often involves a social dilemma known as “the tragedy of the commons”. Many common pool resources, from fish stocks, to forests, to natural tourism destinations have an associated marketing system that may place pressure on the resource. If poorly managed, the resources sustainable future is questionable. This paper explains how commons and strategic action field theory can enhance a macromarketing analysis of marketing systems that involve a common pool resource (CPR) pointing to potential responses and solutions. The unique challenges faced are discussed, particularly in the interdependent areas of: property rights, power and equitable distribution. The findings from an empirical application confirm that CPRs destabilise a marketing system. Solutions may be found in the way the issue is negotiated, how the rules are structured and the perspective from which the issue is considered.

Young people’s excessive alcohol consumption is considered a societal problem in many countries, and higher alcohol taxes are often suggested as a possible remedy. Price increases cannot be effective if unnoticed, but little is known about young people’s alcohol price knowledge and sensitivity, as aggregate price sensitivity studies have produced ambiguous results. Applying individual data, this study examines young people’s knowledge of retail alcohol prices using two price memory tests. Results show that the majority holds fairly accurate reference prices, while a large segment intentionally checks in-store alcohol prices, though large variations exist across categories. Furthermore, logistic regressions revealed ‘purchased a special’ and ‘simple prices’ as determinants of alcohol price knowledge. The results suggest that alcohol tax increases must be significant to be effective when targeting young people. Otherwise, such increases go unnoticed and other policy instruments may perform better, not least when targeting the youngest, and thus most vulnerable group.

Through this longitudinal study of a historically significant, complex, conflicted and evolving macromarketing space, Bosnia’s Arizona Market, the authors reveal that marketing systems are not merely random artifacts of human behavior; rather, they are adaptive, purposeful, can be pernicious and/or provisioning, and ultimately—if they are to reflect our humanity—must be well integrated into other prosocial systems to affect the best possible outcomes for all stakeholders. By engaging with a marketing system in a post-conflict, divided society, we are better able to understand the genesis and evolution of markets and marketing systems; the relationships among war economy, peace accords, and the ways that post-war marketing systems create community, provide for community needs, and create new vulnerabilities for some community members. The authors conclude with a discussion of implications for sustainable peace and prosperity in Bosnia and in other post-conflict marketing systems, and suggestions for future research.

Robert F. Lusch spoke in a plenary session at the 2015 Macromarketing Conference in Chicago and shared four ideas he felt will have importance to macromarketing scholars in the future. His essay “The Long Macro View” follows. In it, he highlights humans’ innate propensity for 1) engaging in exchange, 2) creating technology, 3) encountering choices with unseen costs, and 4) developing institutions to coordinate interactions with each other. Four macromarketers offer their own comments on this essay: 1) Gene R. Laczniak (who also organized the set of commentaries on “The Long Macro View”), 2) Olga Kravets, 3) Clifford J. Shultz, II, and 4) Roger A. Layton. These commentaries were authored and edited shortly before Bob Lusch passed away.

This invited commentary is an edited transcript of remarks made at the opening session of the 40th Annual Macromarketing Conference at the Quinlan School of Business, Loyola University Chicago (June 25-28, 2015). The minor changes that have been added to the verbal remarks below (e.g., section titles, insertions of a few implied words) have been made for clarification purposes only. The theme of that conference was Social Justice Marketing as Provisioning Technology. The focus takes a very long macro view (40,000 years of homo sapiens as a species!). This telescoping lens enables us to view Homo sapiens aggregately, as a macro systemic sociohistoric structure, with an unknown but arguably alterable future. Hence the essay title, “The Long Macro View”.

This brief comment expands on the “long macro view” observation of Prof. Robert Lusch that human choices, including market choices, have massive and unseen costs. It is argued here that a central challenge for macromarketing scholars is to make transparent the hidden costs embedded in macromarketing systems and sub-systems so that their true complexity and heterogeneity are better understood. Distributive Justice demands such consideration.

This invited commentary is a reflection on and response to an essay on “The Long Macro View”, by Robert Lusch, who articulated key themes of human, societal and marketing evolution, and challenges marketing scholars to consider ways to reduce costs inflicted by prolific human activity, particularly (marketing) exchange. Those costs cumulatively pose existential threats to humanity; they also present opportunities, which potentially can be redressed by better understanding of conflict resolution theory, relevant marketing applications to reduce social conflict, and guidance by complementary macromarketing precepts. Consistent with some ideas in the aforementioned essay, the author of this commentary argues for constructive engagement by individuals, organizations and governments via institutional entrepreneurship, which is crucial to enhance the efficiency, effectiveness, fairness and sustainability of a complex and increasingly global macromarketing system, and the well-being and long-term survival of Homo Sapiens.

Robert Lusch (2015) astutely observes that humans are “massive creators of tools and we need to start understanding that.” In my commentary, I seek to complicate and extend this statement on tools or technology by drawing attention to the magic of technology, and how it simultaneously obscures the view of things and invites a fetishistic belief in technological efficacy to change the world. I argue that we must deepen our discussion of technology and start questioning the many ways that today’s technology orders the social world and humans.

This brief paper argues that Professor Robert Lusch’s choice of 40,000 years as a macromarketing time frame is entirely appropriate. It allows macromarketing scholars to explore the natural experiments of history that have accompanied the evolution of market based value exchange networks, and to consider the underlying causal dynamics. In a world of dramatic economic, technological, and political change, the resulting understandings may be essential to effective, system-wide management.