Abstract
This issue of the Journal of Macromarketing contains five articles on a variety of topics: the ethics of brands and lifestyle communities, marketing and health consumption, a history of Spanish grocery retailing, experiential learning projects in macromarketing education, and the marketing of Chinese patriotic songs. It also features a retrospective yet timely commentary. Before the research preview, however, a recap of the 2015 Macromarketing Conference is in order. This annual meeting has been the source of numerous articles appearing in the Journal from its inception in 1981 and the Macromarketing Society Board, the conference governing body, is one and the same as this Journal’s Editorial Policy Board. The following report provides a very brief description of the conference and the awards bestowed. Published in an archived journal, these items may be of interest as a data source for macromarketing researchers in the future.
2015 Macromarketing Conference
The 40th Annual Macromarketing Conference met June 25-28, 2015 at the Quinlan School of Business, Loyola University Chicago Water Tower Campus. Conference co-chairs Clifford Shultz II, Raymond Benton, and Olga Kravets assembled an outstanding program of macromarketing scholarship under the theme “Marketing as Provisioning Technology: Integrating Perspectives on Solutions for Sustainability, Prosperity, and Social Justice” (proceedings available at http://macromarketing.org/macromarketing-conference/past-conference-proceedings/). The program included an opening plenary session, three panel sessions, 44 sessions featuring 138 presentations, and a continuous display of seven posters. There were 153 registrants and 199 participants counting students, volunteers, and partners. They came from 25 different countries with over half from outside the U.S. Among the highlights of the conference was a Saturday afternoon boat cruise on the Chicago River hosted by a docent who discussed the impressive architecture.
Mark Peterson did an excellent job organizing the annual Tony Pecotich Doctoral Colloquium held on June 25 at Loyola University Chicago. The colloquium started with four brief presentations on the macromarketing field and its journal by Mark Peterson, Terry Witkowski, Stan Shapiro, and Olga Kravets. Participants then watched a lively documentary film, “GMO OMG” (2013), ate lunch, and broke into discussion groups to assess how the film depicted macromarketing issues and stakeholders and to formulate some research projects these concerns might generate.
The 2015 Charles C. Slater Award for the article deemed to have made the most significant contribution to the Journal, volumes 33-34, went to “Sustainability as Megatrend: Two Schools of Macromarketing Thought” by John D. Mittelstaedt, Clifford J. Shultz II, William E. Kilbourne, and Mark Peterson and published in the September 2014 special issue, “Sustainability as Megatrend.” The 2015 George Fisk Award for best conference paper was given to “Investigating the Use of Generalized Additive Models for Predicting Propensity for Justice: Using the Integrative Justice Model (IJM) as a Framework for Measuring Justice Outcomes” by Tina M. Facca-Miess and Nicholas J. C. Santos. The 2015 James M. Carman Award for the best student full paper went to “Markets, Marketing, and Gender: A Market Practice Perspective by Riikka Murto. The Journal’s Editorial Policy Board decides the Slater, Fisk, and Carman Awards.
The 2015 Robert W. Nason Award for extraordinary and sustained contributions to the field of macromarketing was bestowed upon George Fisk and Sanford Grossbart. Fisk was the founding and Grosbart the fifth editor of the Journal or Macromarketing. A new honor, the 2015 Robert A. Mittelstaedt Award for macromarketing contributions by an early career scholar, was presented to Michaela Haase. The Macromarketing Society Executive Committee chose the Nason and Mittelstaedt Awards.
The current editor selects the Stanley J. Shapiro Award for best JMK reviewer. This year, the honor was bestowed upon Pierre McDonagh and Andrea Prothero who were guest editors for not one, but two special issues of “Sustainability as Megatrend” in September 2014 and March 2015. Finally, the Shelby D. Hunt Award for the most cited article published in the past five years, based on data from Harzing’s “Publish or Perish” (which in turn is based on Google Scholar), went to “Marketing Means and Ends for a Sustainable Society: A Welfare Agenda for Transformative Change” authored by Richard J. Varey, University of Waikato, New Zealand, and published in June 2010.
Articles
The five articles in this issue are ordered according to their date of acceptance. We begin with “Use of Brand Community Markers to Engage Existing Lifestyle Consumption Communities and Some Ethical Concerns” by Ross Gordon, Sandra Jones, Lance Barrie, and Heidi Gilchrist. Research in business and marketing ethics has not fully addressed the issue of brand activities in consumption communities. In this study, the authors investigate how alcohol sports sponsors engage with fan communities, especially adolescent members, of the Australian National Rugby League (NRL). They used a mixed methods approach consisting of website and television content analyses, observations of promotional activities within stadiums, and twelve male friendship pair/small group interviews including commercial videos as prompts. The findings indicate that alcohol brands are adept at playing off community markers, such as consciousness of kind, rituals and traditions, but that companies’ exercise of moral responsibility is quite problematic. Concerns over how marketing systems affect vulnerable consumers have been a long-standing interest of this Journal.
Recent research in the Journal of Macromarketing has investigated health discourses and, in so doing, has generated some controversy (see the two commentaries in the December 2014 issue). Our second article, “Creating the Cautious Consumer: Marketing Managerialism and Bio-power in Health Consumption,” by Carl Yngfalk and Anna Fyrberg Yngfalk adds to this debate. Drawing on the bio-political framework of Foucault, the authors examine how consumers of a commercial weight loss program in Sweden are embedded within a system of governmentality that imposes collective control of their body identities. The dominant ideology in the marketing field today claims that consumer agency in the marketplace has increased. Yet, this agency exists within a discourse of “healthism,” an ideology promoted by companies and their apologists that makes individual consumers responsible for their physical well-being. Based on qualitative analysis of threads and discussions taken from an online forum, the authors identify strategies of intervention and modes of subjectification. In effect, neoliberal capitalism incessantly creates bodily distress among the public.
The 2013 Congress of the European Business History Association at Uppsala University included a track on distribution systems. Five papers from the sessions were invited to submit to the Journal for additional rigorous review and the first to make it to publication is “Structural Change in Peripheral European Markets: Spanish Grocery Retailing, 1950-2007” by J. Carles Maixé-Altes and Rafael Castro Balaguer. According to the authors, Spanish food retailing has evolved over through the confluence of three factors: 1) technical and organizational innovations, 2) regulation and market structures, and 3) foreign direct investments. Spain’s retail sector lagged behind more developed Europe in the 1950s because of economic and political backwardness, but progressive forces emerged in the 1960s, including investments by Cuban and Mexican businessmen. The arrival of democracy in the 1970s promoted institutional change, as well as the arrival of French hypermarkets, such as Carrefour and Promodès. Spanish retailers were forced to adjust to this new competition. After joining the European Community in 1986, further structural change and foreign investment has ensued and Spain’s retail systems have converged with those of other European countries.
Bringing macromarketing ideas into contemporary marketing education, whose texts and pedagogy are generally micro and managerial, has been a challenge for the field. To encourage a macro perspective, Scott Radford, David Hunt, and Deborah Andrus discuss a new approach in “Experiential Learning Projects: A Pedagogical Path to Macromarketing Education.” The authors begin with a review or the literature on experiential pedagogy, which entails four modes of learning: concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. They then recap two experience-based projects they have tried, one on local non-profit arts organizations and the other on social marketing and entrepreneurship, that not only teach students managerial decision-making, but also further understanding of marketing’s social role. The authors contend that experiential learning is very well-suited to deliver a systems level perspective.
The final article deals with macromarketing and the arts. In her third publication on China published in the Journal, Zhihong Gao tells the story of “When Nationalism Goes to the Market: The Case of Chinese Patriotic Songs.” Gao reviews the long history of Chinese mobilization of nationalism through popular music and how this project continues under present trends in marketization. In the Mao period Chinese Communist cultural workers rewrote the lyrics of folk songs for propaganda purposes and taught the new versions to soldiers and peasants. Artists today show an understanding of marketing strategy by tailoring their songs for different market segments, but they work under government oversight that ensures compliance with state ideology. Then, applying Louis Althusser’s theories of ideological state apparatuses to data gathered from a variety of Chinese sources, Gao writes in detail about four independent performing groups – The Legend of Phoenix, Wang Feng, Wang Leehom, and Su Xing – who convey nationalistic themes.
Book and Media Reviews
The Journal is committed to maintaining a strong book and media review section that advances the field of macromarketing. Suggestions for book reviews, or inquiries about what the book review editor may have available, should be sent to Marilyn Liebrenz-Himes (