Extending Robert F. Lusch’s “Big Picture” Thinking: Introduction

An Agenda for Macromarketers

Here we provide a brief overview Bob’s “Big Picture” Thinking, or – as Bob called it – “The Long Macro View.” In a plenary session at the 2015 Macromarketing Conference he cited four human propensities that are important for macromarketing scholars. Bob stressed that humans have an innate propensity:

to engage in exchange with each other,

Bob expressed a need for a “long view perspective to the past and not to the future…a long view of the past has profound implications for the research that marketing scholars conduct moving forward [into] the future. The four observations and ideas are not about normative conditions; they are a reflection on what has been…the evolution of economic exchange systems…I’m going to go back thousands of years, initially to a tipping point of approximately 40,000 years when our species moved from Neanderthal man to Homo Sapiens” (Lusch 2017). ⁴

With these words Bob Lusch entrusted macromarketing scholars with an awesome responsibility: to investigate a largely unexplored temporal expanse that holds great potential for understanding the present and the future, but whose investigation may well lead to many “dead ends.” By going “Back to our Beginning” we may unveil the essence of four innate tendencies that are at the heart of our being even today, but that are now masked by millennia of progress.

Bob’s call for research on these four innate propensities implies intellectual challenges and knowledge expanding opportunities. As such, we macromarketers are not unlike our distant ancestors – Neanderthals and Denisovans – who faced physical dangers as well as fascinating opportunities as they migrated from Africa some 500,000 years ago. We know they spread across Europe and Asia. One line died out, leaving little trace of their existence; the other line prospered for tens of thousands of years, creating fire, cave paintings, symbolic thought, pendants made from bear teeth, and possibly a belief in an afterlife. Nonetheless, Neanderthals were supplanted by Homo Sapiens around 40,000 years ago – Lusch’s starting point.

Perhaps macromarketers’ application of a Long Macro View has the potential to supplant the current academic focus on the micro-concerns of marketing management. The guest editor hopes we will successfully acquire lessons ranging from the distant past up to today; and will thoughtfully promote our insights to create a foundation for an in depth understanding of marketing’s central role in the economies of today and tomorrow – and in contributing to the quality of our lives and the health of our environment.

Authors and Insights

In this issue 17 authors have written 14 pieces that address one or more of the innate human propensities, and/or that provide recollections of the enormous influence Bob had on their lives and careers.

It should be noted that if Bob could comment here, he would say that each of them influenced his thoughts and career success as much as he did theirs. The stimulation of his mind through idea exchange kept him alive. Literally. At the end of his life, when Bob Lusch’s body had endured enough, the essence of Professor Robert Lusch had to be given verbal permission to pass his scholarly duties on to others. It was only then that he was able to let go. ⁵

The papers are organized a temporally, starting from Bob’s early days as a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin up to his final days as an honored professor at the University of Arizona. Here we list the scholars and their connections to Bob Lusch, then we offer a brief overview of each article.

Shelby Hunt is Jerry S. Rawls and P.W. Horn Professor of Marketing at Texas Tech University.

More details about many of the authors appear in the Appendix.

Bob’s Academic and Personal Life: A Four-Part Harmony

In each Part we briefly overview our authors’ observations on key aspects of Robert F. Lusch’s career. Several authors go into detail on how they have built – and continue to build – on one or more of the foundations he laid down. The authors also address the person each of us was privileged to know. Interestingly, there are multiple facets of Bob that are not widely known, although two common points come across in these essays. First, Robert had an enormous impact on many people, both in his foundational writing and on how he quietly helped people become successful. Second, there is a remarkable commonality to the personal comments about Bob – genuine kindness, deep caring, fairness, generosity, unfailing guidance, loyalty, modesty, service oriented, admiration, affection, gratitude, and most important of all, love of family.

To provide a perspective on Bob’s life, both academic and personal, our authors’ comments are presented in temporal sequence.

Part I. In the Beginning

In this Part we provide a short summary of papers by three people who met Bob at the University of Wisconsin in 1971: Shelby Hunt (Bob’s dissertation chair), plus Gene Laczniak and Don Michie, who joined the doctoral program the same time as Bob – and who both became lifelong friends with Bob and Virginia.

Shelby Hunt delves into the evolution of macromarketing thought, starting with Shaw’s 1912 paper which introduced the concept of distribution systems, their benefits to society, their efficiency and effectiveness, plus the need for product differentiation and promotional activities – noting that advertising may have “unseen costs” (my interpretation).

Hunt (1981) extended Shaw’s work to the aggregate marketing system, its impact on society, and society’s impact on the aggregate marketing system. He then addresses key papers that called for marketing systems studies across countries, recognizing that aggregate marketing systems have “positive and negative aspects” (Wilkie and Moore 1999, 2003). This touches on Lusch’s concern with “unintended consequences.” Hunt then uses service-dominant logic to call for macromarketing to ‘unmask’ how the “aggregate marketing system efficiently and effectively provisions society and contributes to society’s flourishing.”

In short, Shelby Hunt insightfully integrates the thoughts of marketing giants: Shaw (1912), Hunt (1981), Wilkie and Moore (1999, 2003), and Vargo and Lusch (2004). He does so in a straightforward manner for those of us who did not have the privilege of an education in the history of marketing thought, using an impeccable logic that should benefit even those who do know that history.

ˆ “Reflections about Professor Robert F. Lusch: Friend, Co-author and Marketing Visionary”

Gene Laczniak said at Bob’s wake that “we were cohorts, colleagues, co-authors, co-presenters, co-chairs, collaborators, correspondents, confidants and, sometimes, even co-conspirators” over 45 years of friendship. He stressed that Bob had key qualities that held true over a lifetime: generosity, a sense of fairness, and love for his family.

Gene includes some of Lusch’s early comments on his long macro view, including: “A long view is embraced because it views all economies (hunter-gatherer, agricultural, industrial and information) as having a common foundation” (Lusch 2006, 241).…“consistent with S-D logic, whatever the ‘service for service’ exchange, it will be contextualized in a complex, macromarketing system that has evolved over time. The nature of that evolution will affect the character of current and future exchanges.” These comments dovetail with Hunt’s observations.

Laczniak also offers highlights from email correspondence with Lusch on a potential book. For example, “human actors not only have the capacity for justice and fairness but also for unethical behavior;” “markets are coordinated by price and conversation;” “executive compensation and bonus programs on Wall Street are not set by market forces but by internal administrative decision…This tactic involves the dubious role of ‘administrative fiat’ exercised by various powerful firms to evade markets.” These brief excerpts raise issues that macromarketing scholars should address as they work to enrich the Long Macro View.

ˆ “A Personal Salutation to a Dear Friend, Robert F. Lusch”

Don Michie provides a beautiful – and quite moving – insight into Bob, writing “with regard to his leadership, his academic positions, and his colleagues’ acceptance of his leadership at these institutions speak volumes about the credibility, loyalty, respect and appreciation extended by colleagues and administrators.”

On a personal level, Don discusses Bob’s “adventurous streak,” giving detailed examples of various first time events: skiing, riding in a single engine plane piloted by a friend who had just gotten his license, trout fishing, a two couple trip to Mexico that led to creation of “the twins,” and trying to buy an island,…Who knew? Don summarizes with “Bob and Virginia made a great team. They shared that zest for life.”

Part II. Co-Creating Careers

In this Part we provide a short summary of papers by Chuck Ingene and Ray Serpkenci. Like Bob, they began their careers at the University of Oklahoma (OU) “where this remarkable educator, mentor and scholar…got his early start in his academic life…and began his journey to become one of our most creative and provocative thought leaders in marketing and beyond” (Serpkenci 2020). Bob and Chuck arrived at OU in 1975, although they did not meet until 1976. Ray arrived in 1978. Admiration, affection, and gratitude runs through both their essays – as it does in many other essays in this special issue.

Chuck Ingene reflects on meeting Bob Lusch in the weight room at the OU (a story shared at Bob’s wake). This initially random meeting led to several years of pumping iron and, more importantly, of joint research publications. Then Bob persuade me, my colleagues, his colleagues, and the Dean that I should shift from economics to marketing. (I held a joint appointment in Marketing and Economics the year Ray Serpkenci arrived at OU.) One of our early papers integrated my knowledge of economics with Bob’s deep marketing knowledge; this paper became my de facto marketing dissertation. Bob obviously saw a potential in me of which I was unaware.

Bob’s efforts on my behalf continued for many years, leading to involvement with two Summer AMA Conferences, and editorship of the Journal of Retailing. Bob was a mentor and a friend to me, as he was for so many others. I say with humility and gratitude: Bob Lusch co-created my career in a weight room all those years ago.

Ray Serpkenci shares personal insights into his interactions with Bob Lusch – notably that as an MBA student he had “zero interest in marketing, zero interest in a Ph.D. program…[yet] in less than a year…Bob first proposed, and then ‘engineered’ a potential ‘post-MBA’ program with a lot of Finance and Accounting in it up-front, but also a bit of Marketing ‘thrown in’ just to add some zest to the pot.” Ray’s willingness to abandon an MBA for a PhD was clearly influenced not just by “Lusch Logic,” but also by Bob’s “deep caring and affection, his unfailing guidance, genuine kindness, and above all, his promise for a lifelong friendship.” By the early 1980s Bob shifted his interests from empirical research to a conceptual analysis of marketing topics; doing so led him on a path toward what would ultimately become Service-Dominant Logic. Ray states that he has “no doubt that [Bob] could accomplish but perhaps a small fraction of his collective works without his dear wife Virginia and his family always on his side,” a feeling that is shared by several of our authors.

Part III. Insights from AMA Fellows and Journal of Marketing Editors

In this Part we provide a short summary of papers by four Journal of Marketing Editors (Varadarajan, Stewart, Bolton, and Moorman) and four AMA Fellows (Varadarajan, Wilkie, Bolton, and Moorman). Robert F. Lusch and Shelby Hunt were also JM Editors and AMA Fellows, amongst their many other honors.

Rajan Varadarajan offers an original essay on unseen costs – the third human propensity raised by Lusch in his “Long Macro View.” He focuses on “product-market contexts in which non-customers or non-users of the products are…affected…, but largely overlooked…in the stakeholder management literature and [in] stakeholder management practice.” A common example is negative externalities imposed on non-customers. One of the earliest analyses of this phenomena was Ronald Coase’s paper on “The Problem of Social Cost” (Coase 1960). In Rajan’s context, it is the impact of a product exchange on non-customers who suffer due to the exchange (examples are second-hand smoke, gun violence, and various macro-level externalities such as air and water pollution). This suggests that non-customers ought to be considered as stakeholders.

He also touches on the Jevons Paradox: when use of a resource becomes more efficient (normally lowering units sold), more of the resource may be used. For example, better gas mileage may lead to an increase in miles driven, so total gas consumption rises – causing more air pollution. This suggests that some actions, whether by governments (e.g., corporate average fuel economy regulations), companies, or consumers may backfire due to not thinking through the problem in sufficient depth to uncover critical second-order effects.

Rajan concludes by suggesting three responsibilities: Government sustainability, Corporate sustainability, and Consumer sustainability. Respectively, governments, corporations, and consumers desire a larger: economy / market share / quality of life. And, they all seek a smaller impact on the environment. This raises a bedeviling issue – trade-offs between more benefits and less environmental damage; bedeviling for each of the actors, and especially bedeviling for the aggregate marketing system.

“Salutation: Dr. Robert F. Lusch”

Rajan Varadarajan observes from lengthy personal experience that Bob had many admirable traits, including “his modesty about his own scholarship and his admiration for the scholarship of others.” He notes that Bob regularly drew on literature from other disciplines in a manner that “was insightful, provocative and profound.” Rajan’s most important point is that Bob’ “quest for knowledge is worthy of emulation by one and all of us.”

Dave Stewart tells two delightful stories about his relationship with Bob. First, Dave was a “follower.” He followed in Bob’s footsteps on the AMA Board, as AMA Vice President of Finance, as Bob’s successor as JM editor, as a Dean, and as Vice President of Publications for AMA. Dave summarizes this catalog of coincidences with “[i]t was good to follow Bob because he was always willing to share his experience, insights, and wisdom, whatever issue or problem arose.”

Second, the famous service-dominant logic paper (Vargo and Lusch 2004) was submitted to Journal of Marketing when Dave was editor; it was published two years after Dave’s term ended. You must read Dave’s “Reflections on an Extraordinary Marketing Scholar” to fully appreciate the very warm friendship and collegiality between Bob and Dave.

Bill Wilkie takes us on a truly intriguing, in-depth journey through the evolution of marketing thought over the past 20 years, much of it driven by Bob Lusch who “took on some very fundamental issues in the field of Marketing.” First, as Editor of the Journal of Marketing, Bob introduced the Special Millennium Issue of JM in 1999. Through a multi-step process, 127 abstracts were winnowed to 12 published papers. To Bill, “the Millennium Issue of Journal of Marketing stands as one of the outstanding intellectual initiatives that I have seen in my career in the Marketing field. It identified four key, fundamental questions for the field of Marketing, and encouraged new work on these topics:”

How do customers and consumers really behave?

That entire issue is worth reading, or re-reading. Of his own paper (Wilkie and Moore 1999), he says “this paper is perhaps the finest intellectual contribution I have made.”

Second, Wilkie discusses the original Vargo and Lusch (2004) paper on a “a New Dominant Logic for Marketing” [NDL for short] reprising how Wilkie and his co-author delved into its strength and weaknesses in Wilkie and Moore (2006), concluding that NDL was “an effort to bring a new coherence to marketing thought.” Today he applauds “the directions and growth in SDL that Bob and Steve have achieved since then.

Third, Bill analyzes AMA’s four definition of marketing from 1935 to the current one adopted in 2007. We repeat those definitions here:

1935 “(Marketing is) the performance of business activities that direct the flow of goods and services from producers to consumers.”

There was a “clear narrowing of focus over time.” The 1935 definition focused on marketing’s distribution functions – compatible with the way macromarketers view marketing. The 1985 version focused on managerial tasks (aka the 4Ps). The 2004 version narrowed the focus to individual organization acting alone.

Bill then takes us behind the scenes, providing insight into how today’s definition arose:

2007 “Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

In summary, Bob “had always clearly been a macromarketing sort of scholar with a strong sense of history.” [Bill] “liked the fact that we could have uplifting discussions on important issues, and that we both cared about the future of our field. I also much enjoyed the fact that we each had a son who chose to pursue an academic life…may they experience as much pleasure as it brought to us!”

Ruth Bolton draws on Bob Lusch’s insights on how macromarketing can and should contribute to society. She points us to an organization dedicated to this premise: Responsible Research in Business and Management (https://www.rrbm.network/) which advocates three key principles. First, business research should play “an important role in envisioning future scenarios and analyzing opportunities and challenges facing business and society.”

(As we write, COVID-19 seems to have come as a black swan for most (all?) supply chains, while governments have treated a possible pandemic as a black elephant, ⁶ although epidemiologists have predicted one for some time. ⁷ )

Second, all “stakeholders…should play an important role in business research;” this goes well beyond profit to include consumers, employees, NGOs, unions, etc. Importantly, Lusch had raised this topic, noting that “[E]ach entity in an interconnected system is always attempting to do better or improve its condition, [so] the system becomes adaptive. Thus, what emerges as a result of a division of labor (the small view) is a complex adaptive (macro) system that evolves over time (the long view)” Lusch (2006, p. 241).

Third, the “ultimate goal of responsible research is to have an impact.” In short, business research should “produce knowledge that contributes to…a better world,” a principle that is consistent with Service-Dominant Logic.

In summary, Lusch’s “legacy provides us with principles that can help us emulate him.”

Christine Moorman enumerates her reasons for admiring Bob in so much of what he did. He was her mentor; she did not “select him for this role—he selected me and started helping me behind the scenes before I realized how much I needed it.” As editor of the Journal of Marketing, Bob preferred to publish “an article that says something about an important issue, despite some weaknesses in research method, than to publish an exquisitely executed research study that is not on an important topic or issue” (Lusch 1997). Further, he was open to new ideas, new techniques, new theories insights. Articles in JM should have “major implications for the practice of marketing yet, at the same time, makes a solid contribution to marketing theory” (Lusch 1998). Bob’s emphases have been a guiding light for Christine and her team at JM.

Bob’s wide-ranging mind, and deep insight into problems has influenced how many of us think. In Christine’s case, it contributed to her desire to counter the notion that “marketing gets no respect” by launching “The CMO Survey” (https://cmosurvey.org/). It probably helped that Bob persuaded the AMA to contribute initial funding to create the survey.

Bob career speaks volumes about his “nature – he was proactive, service oriented, and focused on quiet but effective actions.…Bob was a genuinely nice person with an enormous capacity for understanding and connecting with the world.” All of us who knew Bob Lusch feel the same way.

Part IV. The University of Arizona Years

Kelli Frias, with Deidre Popovich, Dale F. Duhan and Robert F. Lusch began their research “during the discussions of a dissertation to which Lusch was an insightful advisor and key mentor.” Here they use an intensive, two-part, mixed-methods study of business angel networks (BANs) that provide initial support of $100,000 to $350,000 to small-scale, early-stage entrepreneurs. BANs are composed of “high-net-worth individuals who seek to invest in very early-stage (“seed”) ventures for which there is no family connection.” Funding is forthcoming only if an entrepreneur and his/her proposal meets BANs’ criteria on three dimensions of market risk: commercial compatibility, technical compatibility, and intellectual property (IP) rights enforceability. Suitable investments are ones BANs can evaluate as being low risk and which can benefit from a BAN’s advice and connections.

The paper is empirically tested using 848 assessments from 36 business angels and 70 entrepreneurs who were in a university incubator program. “This method provides a balance between the external validity of field experiments and the internal validity of controlled lab experiments.” Several points are made, with a key one being that a “mismatch between evaluations of risk” by the entrepreneur and the BAN “may bring the investment screening process to an abrupt end.” As BANs fund eight times more start-ups than venture capitalists, it is apparent that matches must occur with reasonable frequency.

The authors end with the following quote: this “study was conceived in collaboration with Robert F. Lusch, and its presence here is designed to continue the conversation about marketing ecosystems and, in particular, the marketing and finance link.”

David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan take us on a fascinating journey of Homo Sapiens’ intellectual evolution from our earliest days up to the flourishing of Athenian democracy – and liberty – around 360 BCE. In doing so they introduce three of Lusch’s innate tendencies:

to engage in exchange with each other,

In short, they address all innate tendencies except unseen costs.

We illustrate their insights with a few quotations from their article.

“Homo sapiens became the wisest of primates around forty thousand years ago, when we learned to make deals with strangers…modern humans evidently practiced some rudimentary division of labor almost from the start, engaging in both intra- and inter-group trade.”

Why – initially – did trade occur at great distances (by the standards of the time). One reason is that there are critical resources that are not ubiquitous. Herodotus (1968) mentions tin shipped from the Isles of Scilly to be combined with copper to create bronze. For many peoples, entrance to the Bronze Age (c. 3300 BC) required long-distance exchange.

Exchange and Technology are intertwined with Institutions:

Sumerians invented a large-scale drainage system, a large-scale bureaucratic government, formal laws, standard weights and measures so as to facilitate markets, a medium of exchange, institutions of credit, and devices for keeping time. They developed cuneiform writing around 3000 BC. They invented schools around 2500 BC ( Kramer 1981, 3).

The Bronze Age was superseded by the Iron Age (c. 1200 BC), which made possible new and/or improved tools that were relatively affordable to workers, for example, to farmers.

An unprecedented number of new tools were fashioned, among them spades, tongs, shears, and planes, while oxen were made to work corn mills and olive crushers

Further, exchange is transparently easier when distances are smaller.

agriculture is not even tolerably productive unless it incorporates many goods and services produced in cities or transplanted from cities (Jacobs 1970, 7).

A refined alphabet (Greece, 8th century BC) and coinage (Lydia, 7th century BC) were major Technological advances that facilitated Exchange and Institutions:

refinements of number and writing were prime tools of the mind, though they [were] first developed as essential notations in long-distance trading and commercial accountancy (Mumford 1961, 191).

Bob Lusch: A Man of All Seasons

When Chuck Ingene asked me to contribute to this special issue of the Journal of Macromarketing, I had no idea what I could possibly add to the thoughts of his esteemed friends and colleagues. “Thank you for contributing,” although heartfelt, seemed pretty insignificant. So, I decided to sum up the “Big Picture Bob” as “A Man of All Seasons.”