Abstract
Mark Peterson’s is the latest in a number of efforts to provide macromarketing teaching materials. This commentary discusses two important monographs published in the early 1970s; Fisk’s early attempt to spell out the domain of macromarketing; the first macromarketing bibliography, which appeared in 1990; and an important article by Tamilia in which he argued that, for purposes of both pedagogy and further disciplinary development, a macromarketing textbook was urgently required. Attention is then called to more recent efforts to provide macromarketing reading lists and to promote a “controversies-based” approach to the study of macromarketing. The closing section explores the similarities and shared macromarketing dimensions of Peterson’s Sustainable Enterprise and Michael Baker’s expanded concept of a Social Business.
Keywords
The publication of Mark Peterson’s Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach, a text incorporating a number of macromarketing-related themes and components, calls for a review of past efforts in providing macromarketing teaching materials. The following is a selection of some of the more relevant history.
The First Macro Marketing Monographs
The term macromarketing, sometimes written as one word and sometimes as two—with or without a hyphen—can be traced back to the early 1970s (Tamilia 1992). Reed Moyer published Macro Marketing: A Social Perspective in 1972. The next year, Grashof and Kelman (1973) published Introduction to Macro-Marketing. Both volumes appeared during a brief “Golden Age” of publications dealing with different aspects of marketing and society (Aaker and Day 1971; Dixon and McLaughlin 1971; Furuhashi and McCarthy 1971; Gist 1971a, 1971b; Lavidge and Holloway 1969; Preston 1968; Sheth and Wright 1974). The extent to which this burst of concern with questionable aspects of marketing’s societal performance was triggered by the social activism of the US civil rights movement and Vietnam War period cannot be known for certain, but a relationship seems likely.
Though Moyer (1972) and Grashof and Kelman (1973) used the same term in their titles, the prefaces to the two publications make it clear that these two books were very different in focus, design, and intent. Moyer (1972, viii) stated:
I do not attempt to deal with every conceivable macro marketing issue. I ignore completely questions involving the changing structure of retail distribution and problems flowing from the need to create mass distribution systems to match systems of mass production. Instead, the book spotlights several key social and economic issues at the macro level.
One of my purposes here is to evaluate marketing’s performance. How well does it perform its functions? How effectively does it respond to its challenges? Is it true that marketing creates “false’ wants, manipulates men’s minds, bamboozles innocent consumers, and wastes precious resources in duplicative advertising? We need to evaluate these and other charges to sift truth from unverified assertion.
The second edition of this book (Moyer and Hutt 1978) pays modestly more attention to systems issues, but the focus remains on legal and ethical dimensions of the marketing mix. The contrast of both editions with Grashof and Kelman (1973) could thus not be clearer. The later book focuses on systemic concerns rather than social issues.
In recent years, some marketing educators have begun to reevaluate the content of the first marketing course, particularly the lack of macro-oriented material. Part of the reason for this reevaluation is the heightened level of awareness of consumer and social problems, and the attendant distrust of students, even business majors, toward the American business system.…
The approach used by some professors has been to include material on social issues in marketing or marketing as a vehicle for social change. While not unimportant, it is the authors’ view that such material does not directly attack the problem of lack of understanding of the macro role of marketing in the U.S. economy nor directly contribute to an understanding of the rationale for the current approach to the practice of marketing management. This text has addressed itself directly to these two questions and has, by design, avoided direct discussion of social issues (Grashof and Kelman 1973, Preface).
Looking backward, the Grashof and Kelman (1973) position was reasonably consistent with what was to become the current macromarketing emphasis on the centrality of marketing systems. While Moyer (1972) discussed issues that macromarketing research subsequently explored primarily under the heading of distributive justice and vulnerable consumers.
Defining the Domain of Macromarketing
When participants from the annual Macromarketing Seminars (first held in 1976) launched the Journal of Macromarketing in 1981, a more precise understanding of the domain of macromarketing became necessary because what was to be published in this new journal would come to be recognized as the primary macromarketing literature. George Fisk, the first editor of the Journal of Macromarketing, felt compelled to spell out in the first few issues which types of manuscripts would be welcomed. In his opening “Invitation to Participate,” Fisk (1981, 3) provided readers with a statement of the Journal’s focus:
Our primary goal is to provide a forum in which people can debate and clarify the role of marketing in society. To accomplish this, we hope to identify social issues on which improvements in knowledge can lead to improvements in the way resources are managed in private and public organizations to serve society’s interest. The word macromarketing implies that we care about the consequences of large marketing systems on large social issues. Examples of these issues include environmental deterioration and renewal, economic development of national economies, the influence of marketing on the quality of life, and marketing efficiency in mobilizing and allocating resources. In short, we seek knowledge to improve marketing strategies and policies that affect social welfare.
Fisk then proceeds in his “Invitation” to spell out in more detail the kinds of submissions that would be welcomed. These included, among others, interindustry analyses of the benefit and cost effects of collecting, sorting, and dispersing. He also made reference to manuscripts on market adjustments of supply and demand at industry and economy levels of aggregation and to submissions dealing with the role of marketing in economic development. Linked to these issues were investigations of marketing’s relation to quality of life and standards of living, and studies of the aggregate consumption of goods. The latter included societal consequences and societal sanction systems for shaping consumer freedom of choice, as well as the impact of economic systems on marketing practices and vice versa. Finally, in his long list, Fisk identified further topics of interest including macromarketing behavior with respect to the diffusion of new knowledge; comparative studies of societal adaptations to market sanctions; and the consequences of marketing including its spillover benefits and costs.
Fisk, the editors who followed him, and important conceptual articles (Hunt and Burnett 1982) subsequently refined, modified, and further developed the domain of macromarketing. Nevertheless, the 1981 “Invitation to Participate” in large part determined what has come to be recognized as the domain of the macromarketing literature.
The Would be Textbook That Became a Bibliography
The Spring 1990 issue of the Journal of Macromarketing contained a thirty-page annotated bibliography which, put quite simply, included whatever books and articles that twenty of those attendees at the 1988 Macromarketing Seminar had chosen to submit (Fisk 1990). When a decision taken at the 1988 Macromarketing Seminar to collectively author a macromarketing textbook did not advance beyond the talking stage, this bibliography was prepared instead. Interestingly, material from the Journal of Macromarketing itself made up only a modest percentage of this extensive list.
A review of this bibliography provides an interesting picture of what was then considered to be relevant material. The major headings include (1) Comparative Marketing and Development; (2) Cultural Behavior and Social Change; (3) Ecological Marketing; (4) Ethics of Marketing (Moral Standards); (5) Externalities of Macroconsumption and Macroinstitutional Behavior; (6) Macroconsumption; (7) Macroinstitutional Behavior in Marketing Channels; (8) Maromarketing Management; (9) Macromarketing Methodology; (10) Macromarketing Performance Evaluation; and (11) Public Policy and Marketing Regulations. It is worth noting that little of this particular categorization ever appeared again in subsequent bibliographies.
In a paper that deserves far more attention than it has received, Tamilia (1992) discussed the role that textbooks have played over the years to the development of academic marketing. He then went on to make, despite of all the challenges it would pose, an impassioned plea for the development of a macromarketing text:
The absence of a contemporary macromarketing college textbook can affect its knowledge development process in a number of ways. First, a textbook attempts to integrate a field and its various components and to give it structure which cannot be accomplished with any one article. Second, the depth and breath of source materials enable a textbook writer to give meaning to the field by stating where the field (and its components) have been, where it is now, and where it is going in terms of theory building, research findings, problem areas, and so forth. Such a task simply cannot be accomplished with journals. Finally, it is an ideal tool for knowledge dissemination not only for college students but for other students of macromarketing as well.
Knowledge development and knowledge dissemination are two inseparable obligations of any field of study. Academic macromarketers, by the very position they occupy, have a duty and a responsibility to teach macromarketing. The absence of a textbook in macromarketing puts unnecessary demands on those who want to teach the subject. Only the hearty and true converts are willing to make self-imposed sacrifices to structure the field and to make sense out of a seemingly disparate set of articles and specialized reading material. (p. 84)
This plea notwithstanding, nothing that could possibly be considered a macromarketing text has previously been published and the first reader appeared only in 2009 (Shapiro, Tadajewski, and Shultz 2009).
Identifying Macromarketing’s Major Themes
What did occur throughout the 1990s was the identification of still generally recognized macromarketing themes or areas of interest. Much of this happened somewhat opportunistically when Bob Nason, during his ten-year term as the editor of the Journal of Macromarketing, entered into what would now be called strategic alliances with special interest groups focused on the history of marketing thought and practice, on marketing and economic development, and on marketing and the quality of life. The Journal of Macromarketing became for some years the venue where the best of the material presented at the conferences held by these interest groups was subsequently published. That, in turn, led to the appointment of Associate Editors for these areas and for such other by then generally recognized core macro areas including Competition, Markets and Marketing Systems; Marketing Ethics and Distributive Justice; and Global Policy and Environment (Shultz 2007a).
The Pedagogical Push of Recent Years
Sixteen years after Fisk (1990) edited the first macromarketing bibliography, a second one appeared in the Silver Anniversary Issue of the Journal of Macromarketing (Shapiro 2006). This bibliography was intended as a doctoral level reading list. It consisted entirely of articles either published in the Journal of Macromarketing or published elsewhere by authors who had also published in the Journal. Members of the Macromarketing Policy Board were initially asked for suggestions as to what should be included and then were given an opportunity to comment on the penultimate copy of the proposed readings list.
Given that the list in question was prepared some six years ago, perhaps here too the most useful information still of relevance might be the categories under which articles had been grouped. These were (1) Macromarketing: The Broader Context and Early Definitional Efforts; (2) Developing the Domain of Macromarketing; (3) Macromarketing Systems Thinking; (4) Markets and their Regulation; (5) Externalities and Impacts; (6) The Politics of Distribution and the Consumer Activist; (7) Marketing Ethics, Distributive Justice and the Disadvantaged Consumer; (8) Marketing and the Quality-of-Life; (9) Sustainability and Consumption; (10) History, Thought, and Macromarketing; (11) Marketing and Economic Development; and (12) A Case in Point: Macromarketing Dimensions of Food Distribution. All of these topics, with the possible exception of the politics of distribution, had long been generally accepted macromarketing areas of interest. The preparation of this bibliography was followed by the publication a few years later of a four volume, eighty item set of Macromarketing readings, only twenty-four of which by publisher edict could came from the Journal of Macromarketing. This collection has a global focus with particular attention being paid to issues of development, equity, and poverty (Shapiro, Tadajewski, and Shultz 2009).
Starting in 2007, the Annual Macromarketing Conferences have contained one session on Macromarketing Pedagogy or Education. Unfortunately, the number of papers submitted on this topic only has required one session per meeting. This material is available at the Macromarketing Society website (www.macromarketing.org) as are the entire Proceedings volumes from 200× on. My contribution to that literature, which dealt most directly with pedagogical approaches and related materials, was a paper advocating a “controversies based” approach to the teaching of macromarketing (Shapiro 2008).
For each of eight such controversies (i.e., the price that should be charged for AIDS drugs in the developing world, how the UN’s Millennium goals could best be achieved, etc.), a brief overview of the issue is first provided. Students are then referred to articles representative of the very different positions that have been taken on the issue, some by macromarketing scholars and others by those writing from different disciplinary perspectives. Should students actually be assigned one or more of those sets of readings, they could then be required first to take a position and then to defend it in a classroom discussion and/or to make their own written policy recommendations on that issue (pp. 426–27).
Both far more detail on the controversies approach and ten examples of it can be found on the Macromarketing Society website (http://macromarketing.org.) where material first appearing in a Canadianization of an International Marketing text has been posted.
Given the focus of this set of commentaries, the following extract from the Shapiro “controversies” paper also seems relevant.
What might the future hold as far as macromarketing pedagogy is concerned? The time for writing a macromarketing text, an often discussed but never completed task, may well have come and gone. Given its necessarily wide ranging scope, such a text would be a difficult one to author, individually or even collectively. Since very few macromarketing courses are now offered, it would also be difficult to find a publisher, especially in light of all the consolidation that has taken place over the years in post secondary textbook publishing. Although self-publishing by the Macromarketing Society remains a possibility, this too poses any number of challenges.
What might better be undertaken at this time is the design of a free, online macromarketing course. Such a course could and should be universally available for use, in whole or in part, by interested marketing and society/macromarketing instructors and their students. (Shapiro 2008, 428)
Though the paper goes on to discuss how such an online course might be designed, it has yet to materialize to the best of my knowledge.
Sustainable Enterprise, Social Business, and Macromarketing
This set of commentaries opens with a discussion by Mark Peterson of the nature and scope of Sustainable Enterprise: A Macromarketing Approach. That being so, there is very little I need to say about the contents of that book other than that I personally found reading it an incredible learning experience. A great deal of which I was previously unaware has been going on in the world of triple bottom line business management. A myriad of tools, concepts, developments, events, and techniques, some but certainly not all drawn from macromarketing, are shown to be contributing to the emergence of truly sustainable enterprises.
Despite its many merits, I do not think Peterson’s publication should be viewed purely as a macromarketing research text for no market of any size exists for such a text. Sustainable Enterprise takes the approach of drawing heavily from macromarketing research while providing both content and, even more importantly, structure for business courses in “Managing for Sustainability” or “Business and Society.” Both of these areas offer far larger target markets for Peterson’s excellent and imaginative text. This book, by providing a myriad of examples, paves the way for others who also want their enterprises to become sustainable ones.
Now let us assume for a moment that, instead of authoring this text, Peterson had decided to launch a journal called Sustainable Enterprise. One cannot help but wonder what types of articles from which disciplines he would consider appropriate for publication. Interestingly enough, Michael Baker, one of the UK’s preeminent marketing scholars, has recently launched Social Business: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Baker’s definition of “Social Business” is far more encompassing than the better-known Yunus (2010) definition that both prohibits paying dividends and, quite understandably, has a micro credit focus.
A Baker social business would very definitely wish to pay dividends. But “while doing well while by doing good” and by concerning itself with the issues he identifies below, the kind of “Social Business” Baker advocates is quite similar to Peterson’s “Sustainable Enterprise.”
While Yunus has attracted support from major corporations, it seems unlikely that the shareholders in these businesses will forgo their rights to a return on their investment. At the same time these shareholders are becoming increasingly aware of the issues that confront global society as we move into the twenty first century which brings them into sharp relief. In a nutshell, many shareholders accept that there are other stakeholders involved with and influenced by business and that their interests have to be factored into the organisation’s actions to ensure an equitable ‘triple bottom line’.
Essentially then, social business is about allocating scarce resources so as to optimise the return on them in an environmentally sustainable way, always provided that the value of the return exceeds the cost of creating it. To do so the important subjects to be addressed include all of the following: corporate social responsibility; entrepreneurship; environmentalism and climate change; Foreign Aid and Investment; globalisation; innovation—social and technological; microcredit and microfinance; sustainability; transformational marketing including: eco and green marketing, ethics, marketing for NPOs, Social Marketing, and well-being. Clearly, these issues go well beyond the scope of any single approach or discipline. As such the ambition of
Baker then goes on in his opening editorial to ask proponents of different academic disciplines to contribute items from their respective academic silos that have relevance to his expanded concept of Social Business. I was subsequently invited, in hopes of providing an example to others, to discuss the macromarketing literature most relevant to what Baker was hoping to accomplish.
How and why some forty articles were chosen is discussed in Shapiro (2012), as is the fact that “Constructive Engagement” (Shultz 2007b) can properly be considered as the skylight in the roof of the macromarketing silo. But more to the immediate point, I would also argue that those macromarketing sources are the same ones from which a professor would select a set of readings or, at the very least, prepare a reading list to accompany the Peterson text. The objective in either case would be to provide students whose interest in macromarketing was awakened by Sustainable Enterprise with a far more complete feel for our subdiscipline.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.