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This essay explores sustainable consumption and considers possible roles for marketing and consumer researchers and public policy makers in addressing the many sustainability challenges that pervade the planet. Future research approaches to this interdisciplinary topic must be comprehensive and systematic and would benefit from a variety of different perspectives. There are several opportunities for further research; the authors explore three areas in detail. First, they consider the inconsistency between the attitudes and behaviors of consumers with respect to sustainability. Second, they broaden the agenda to explore the role of individual citizens in society. Third, they propose a macroinstitutional approach to fostering sustainability. For each of these separate, but interrelated, opportunities, the authors examine the area in detail and consider possible research avenues and public policy initiatives.

This article argues that micromarketing cannot examine the relationship between sustainable consumption and the quality of life critically because the essence of the relationship lies in the dominant social paradigm. Only macromarketing can address this relationship effectively. It is within the intellectual purview of macromarketing to expand the domain of inquiry to include technological, political, and economic benefits and costs of consumption, thus challenging the paradigm itself

Twenty-five years of conceptual and empirical research in macromarketing can be synthesized in three fundamental, complementary principles: that markets are systems, that markets are heterogeneous, and the actions of market participants have consequences far beyond the boundaries of firms. Together, these principal findings form the foundation of a theory of macromarketing. The authors argue that macro-marketing, in contrast to micromarketing and microeconomics, is uniquely positioned to address many market-related questions of the coming century.