Re-imagining Marketing Scholarship in the era of the UN Sustainable Development Goals

Abstract

The pandemic, rising inequalities, climate change, consumer mistrust of brands, organizations and their intentions, pose important questions relating to marketing’s relevance and impact in the real world. Additionally, there are growing calls by global bodies, such as the UN, national governments, consumers, students, suppliers, and leading practitioners to re-imagine and broaden the role of business and marketing to consider benefits to stakeholders (consumers, suppliers, employees, community, as well as shareholders). In this editorial, we contend that the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs) framework has the potential to address the myriad of challenges identified by marketing scholars and practitioners. With the assistance of quotes from marketing scholars, non-marketing scholars, marketing students and practitioners, we offer a rationale for a proactive and considered engagement by marketing scholarship, with the UN SDGs. We then introduce the six papers included in this special issue. We conclude by calling for further critical inquiry at the marketing-SDGs interface including; 1) Re-imagining the philosophy of marketing and marketing education; 2) Marketing capabilities and the SDGs; 3) Understanding consumer behavior, and 4) Learning across contexts.

Towards a Bhaskarian Metatheory for Marketing Systems

“…Macromarketing has emphasized broader societal interactions, addressing crucial issues like poverty and sustainability (DeQuero-Navarro, Stanton, and Klein 2021; Eckhardt, Dholakia, and Varman 2013; Fırat 2013; Mele and Spena 2021; Shultz 2016; Varey 2012). Moreover, macromarketing has acknowledged that many current manifestations of crisis are intimately tied to marketing (Löbler 2016; Nenonen 2022; Voola et al 2022; Wooliscroft and Ganglmair-Wooliscroft 2018). However, as Kindermann et al (2023) and others have noted, much of the mainstream of the discipline has long faced critiques, such as; - a reductive concern with micro issues and short-term pragmatic problems, leading to a lack of theory development and contribution to domains outside of marketing research (Clark et al 2014); - rhetoric of value trapped in selfishly motivated consumers, a disregard for inequality and the stratification of social groups, and a false sense of individual choice and freedom (Saren et al 2007); - part of a relatively ‘uncritical’ business school agenda abandoning social, intellectual and ethical values in favour of uncritical managerialism (Dholakia and Firat 2017; Witkowski 2005), and; - a pseudo-conflict between quantitative and qualitative approaches (Gummesson 2003).…”

Emerging Research Trends in Marketing: A Review of Australasian Marketing Journal

“…Building upon the past and current trends identified in this article, we delineate three unique areas of future research: (1) purpose-driven marketing, (2) Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion marketing, and (3) the bright side and dark side of marketing (see Table 1). First, it is critical that marketing has become an essential part of the purposedriven transformation within businesses that have committed to embracing higher purpose as a sustainable way of business growth (Voola, Carlson et al, 2022;Rosenbloom, 2022). By positioning a firm's core business around human development, marketing can help address the Sustainable Development Goals (Bolton, 2022;Voola, Bandyopadhyay et al, 2022;Voola, Carlson et al, 2022) such as value co-creation of health and social outcomes in an eHealth digital eco-system context (Wyllie et al, 2022), sustainable consumption and production (W. M. Lim, 2022), and Disciplined Vision Casting as a new method for exploring alternative futures by reconciling marketing and sustainability (Ramirez & Tajdini, 2022).…”

Reimagining How Meaningfulness Can be Reconciled With Marketing

“…Calls for marketing to have greater individual life-changing relevance and social impact proliferate (Grönroos, 2023; Voola et al, 2022). Marketing practitioners have been challenged to address how does a utilitarian brand become an emotional powerhouse, a source of individual life changing and social impact for everyday life, a meaningful brand-for-life ?…”