Download Some Macromarketing Thoughts on Recent Natural and Human

JUNE 2005
JOURNAL
OF MACROMARKETING
FROM THE EDITOR
Some Macromarketing Thoughts on
Recent Natural and Human-Induced Disasters
B
ig events of our time provide opportunities to reflect on
the relevance of our discipline and its focus. The focus of
macromarketing is big, complex, and systemic issues, the
interplay of marketing and society, and ultimately, improvements to life quality for large numbers of stakeholders
affected by marketing systems. Few, if any, recent events
were/are bigger—with more complex and systemic repercussions—than the War in Iraq and the tsunami that swept across
the Indian Ocean. The former drags on at considerable
human, economic, social, and political costs; the latter devastated coastal regions of several countries and killed perhaps as
many as 300,000 people. Both have left marketing systems in
shambles. The causes and global effects of these cataclysms
can be difficult to comprehend, yet our humanity drives us to
try to understand and to do something, to assuage the
suffering, and to prevent future disasters.
Macromarketers are a group inclined to work toward possible contributions to recovery and prevention. It would be
simplistic to think that a single, brief editorial could layout a
foolproof macromarketing prescription for the prevention of
and recovery from disasters on the scale of the recent tsunami,
the Iraq War and more broadly, the global “war on terrorism.”
Some trends, however, do suggest that solutions point toward
macromarketing. In the instance of natural disasters, those
countries and communities with more developed marketing
systems suffer less damage and recover more quickly. They
furthermore not only tend to be less traumatized from initial
shock, they also suffer fewer postshock complications from
ensuing public health crises. Their marketing systems feature,
for example, better infrastructure in the forms of quality construction; advanced distribution, transportation, and communication networks; more goods and services; more highly
trained personnel, equipped for crisis management; and political leadership genuinely committed to people’s welfare, with
ready access to capital and other forms of global assistance. In
the instance of war, while a commitment to marketing system
revitalization clearly is paramount to recovery from devastation, perhaps the greater contribution of macromarketing lies
in the prevention of war. One could argue that trends of the last
half century indicate that countries and communities with
well-developed and interdependent marketing systems,
administered by governments committed to transparency,
stakeholder inclusion, distributive justice, and societal
welfare, are less likely to become enmeshed in military and
paramilitary conflicts. The relationship between Germany
and France following World War II, and the administration of
the greater European Union provide examples. Indeed, even
from the ashes of horrific destruction wrought by the most
acrimonious relationships, communities/countries/regions
can create stable, responsible, and just marketing systems. And
because macromarketers view marketing as a “provisioning
technology” (Fisk 1981, 3) that should be implemented to
society’s benefit, macromarketers should be the vanguard of
analyses and solutions to these most vexing conditions.
Marketing systems can be extraordinarily complex, messy,
flawed, difficult to assess and measure, and even incomprehensible to some observers; they can include stakeholders
who vehemently and sometimes violently disagree about how
or whether the system should be managed. Nevertheless, I am
hard pressed to think of a greater academic agenda than to
focus one’s scholarship on policies and practices to help our
fellow global citizens recovering from natural or humaninduced disasters. Precisely because the issues are big, complex, systemic, messy, and have profound and widespread
repercussions for large numbers of people the world over,
they are the stuff of macromarketing and macromarketers,
who, through historical analysis and understanding, investigations of aggregations and marketing systems, and concern
for fair competition, distributive justice, socioeconomic
development, and globalization processes that ultimately
enhance quality of life, have made and will continue to make
some of the most meaningful contributions.
Finally, some scholars in the marketing community may
believe these issues are beyond “mainstream” academic marketing, which raises an interesting question: if the marketing
exemplar eschews a complex, messy, and interconnected
world ravaged by human and natural devastation, can it really
be considered the mainstream? Answering that question is
left to the good readers of the marketing literature. However, I
shall hint at what I believe to be the correct answer by encouraging marketing scholars and other scholars to use their methodological tool kits to explore these macromarketing
Journal of Macromarketing, Vol. 25 No. 1, June 2005 3-4
DOI: 10.1177/0276146705276063
© 2005 Sage Publications
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JUNE 2005
phenomena, thus redirecting the mainstream of the academy
into the mainstream of humanity.
Clifford J. Shultz II
Arizona State University
REFERENCES
Fisk, George. 1981. An invitation to participate in affairs of the Journal of
Macromarketing. Journal of Macromarketing 1 (1):3-6.
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