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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 3 Downloaded from jmk.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016 4 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. Downloaded from jmk.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 11, 2016