Marketing's broadening has enabled the discipline to engage diverse phenomena, but it has also created a theoretical problem: empirical relevance does not necessarily constitute a marketing contribution. This commentary identifies this theoretical dilemma as the Broadening Paradox and introduces Boundarying as a way of addressing it. Rather than defining fixed disciplinary limits, Boundarying asks whether emerging concepts advance marketing through distinctive explanatory mechanisms. We develop three diagnostic principles these are value proposition, reciprocal stakeholder relationships, and stakeholder responsiveness to assess whether concepts explain participation, value formation through interaction, and adaptation through stakeholder feedback. Illustrations from artificial intelligence, government regulation, and corporate sustainability show how the same phenomenon can generate different theoretical contributions depending on its underlying explanatory logic. Boundarying therefore complements rather than constrains broadening by shifting attention from where marketing is applied to what marketing explains. The commentary offers a basis for developing more cumulative and theoretically distinctive marketing knowledge.
This study examines the legitimation of the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) (in English, Landless Workers’ Movement) in the traditional food market through the decolonial lens of transmodernity. Legitimacy is conceptualized as a process shaped by regulatory, normative, and cultural-cognitive pillars. Although marketing and macromarketing literatures address market legitimacy, they leave unexplored the legitimation processes of organizations from the Global South that challenge dominant capitalist logics. Addressing this gap, the study analyzes how the MST - historically criminalized and positioned outside formal market systems - strategically engages markets while sustaining anticapitalist commitments. Using a qualitative, multimethod approach informed by decolonial epistemology, the research combines desk research, interviews with MST leaders and consumers, and observations in organic food fairs and Armazém do Campo stores. Findings show that the MST attains partial legitimacy by mobilizing certifications, agroecological values, and consumer worldviews, reinforcing the idea that markets are just as political as commercialization arenas.
With the ongoing, rapid-fire changes in technologies of artificial intelligence (AI), the strongly operational focus of marketing on marketspace exchange processes may cause its demise as marketing processes simply become techno-automated ways – run by algorithms and bots – of finding and filling needs and wants. If marketing were to disappear as an academic field, and as a department within organizations, it would be a big loss in terms of the timeless, enduring essence of marketing-like processes and millennia-old consumer culture. In this commentary, we advocate for strengthening a millennia-old essence: a deep understanding of the recurring construction, institutionalization, and (un)fulfillment of the complex of desire, which is an inexorable necessity to decipher the dynamics of human (and emerging machinic, hybrid) existence. Our proposed framework positions marketing as an interdisciplinary field centered on the dynamics of desire rather than market transactions alone. By redefining the discipline around this foundational phenomenon, we offer a future-oriented vision that preserves marketing's relevance, enhances its theoretical depth, and equips it to address emerging realities in an increasingly complex world.
Artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly structures how consumers encounter, evaluate, and select marketplace options, raising fundamental questions about autonomy, empowerment, and welfare-enhancing choice environments. While prior work has focused on what algorithms recommend, less is known about how recommendation system architecture shapes the experience of choice. Across three experiments, this research examines the societal and psychological implications of perceived algorithmic plurality, defined as consumers’ perception that recommendation authority is distributed across multiple distinct AI agents, each guided by distinct evaluative criteria. Results show that structuring ethical recommendations through a plural AI architecture enhances consumers’ self–brand connection. Study 2 demonstrates that plural recommendations increase perceived autonomy, which strengthens self–brand connection and purchase intentions. Study 3 shows these effects are strongest among low-knowledge consumers, suggesting plurality can function as an equity-enhancing design feature. By shifting attention from algorithmic outputs to the socio-technical structure of AI nudges, this research advances understanding of consumer emancipation in digital marketplaces.
Artificial intelligence represents a fundamental disruption to marketing, yet existing research treats AI as an instrumental tool rather than an epistemological challenge. This paper makes an original theoretical contribution by reframing AI's impact as an epistemological transformation rather than solely as an adoption decision. Introducing a four-quadrant knowledge matrix distinguishing known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns, and unknown knowns, the analysis reveals that AI amplifies exploitation of known knowns through automation, accelerates exploration of known unknowns through analytics, but paradoxically both reveals and generates unknown unknowns through emergent behaviors that reorganize markets unpredictably. Traditional uncertainty-reduction strategies prove inadequate for these inherently unpredictable disruptions. Building on Taleb's concept of antifragility, the paper argues marketing organizations should shift from knowledge optimization toward epistemic antifragility. The goal is to provide scholars with new frameworks for theorizing uncertainty under AI disruption, while offering managers and policymakers actionable guidance for building organizational capabilities that gain strength from disruption rather than simply attempting to eliminate it.
Some of the most intense marketplace backlash targets brand actions that take no political position, such as a retired logo or rebrand. They rival any boycott, yet their direction flips with the brand rather than politics, which ideology leaves unexplained. This paper traces such backlash to chronic mattering depletion, a shortfall in the sense of being significant to others. Depletion gives rise to an intergroup zero-sum belief, the reading that a brand's regard for one group is another's loss. Significance is not finite, but marketing and platform systems can manufacture the appearance of scarcity. The propositions hold that social and economic position distributes depletion, that algorithmic media amplify that conversion, and that backlash follows only where a brand action is publicly legible and the consumer identifies with the slighted group. It reframes backlash as how markets grant or deny significance, a distributive concern macromarketing is equipped to address.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is reshaping how power, trust, and agency are distributed across market systems. This study examines the earliest phase of GenAI adoption, analyzing 478,232 tweets posted between November 2022 and April 2023 following the public release of ChatGPT, to understand how stakeholders negotiated autonomy, vulnerability, and control in algorithm-mediated environments. Topic modeling reveals a dual narrative in which GenAI was embraced for its creative augmentation while simultaneously prompting concern about opacity, fairness, and diminished influence. These patterns illuminate the trust-power paradox, the tension between relying on GenAI for enhanced capability and experiencing reduced agency through centralized, opaque decision structures. Drawing from these insights, we develop three conceptual models, the Stakeholder Experience Matrix, the Emancipatory Readiness Funnel, and the Ethical AI Governance Compass, which together explain how early encounters with GenAI shape conditions for stakeholder emancipation and socially responsible marketing. The study advances macromarketing scholarship by linking early public meaning making to structural mechanisms of trust, empowerment, and governance, and offers a foundation for designing AI systems that strengthen rather than constrain stakeholder agency.
This article advances macromarketing by introducing phygital science as a foundational paradigm for understanding integrated physical-digital ecosystems and by proposing the Human First Phygital Value (HFPV) framework as its core theoretical architecture. As physical and digital markets fuse into integrated sociotechnical ecosystems, prevailing digital transformation models; rooted in technocentric and efficiency-driven logics; are no longer adequate for explaining how value, well-being, and justice emerge in blended contexts. HFPV reframes phygital markets as dynamic systems shaped by human needs, institutional governance, cultural meaning, and technological affordances, and conceptualizes value as “poly-created” through continuous human-technology-context entanglement. The framework delineates the inputs, processes, outcomes, and systemic feedback loops that structure societal value in integrated physical-digital ecosystems, offering macromarketing a comprehensive lens for analyzing human flourishing, institutional trust, resilience, and equity at scale. By articulating a human-first orientation for phygital market design and governance, this article establishes the conceptual groundwork for a new research agenda focused on ethical AI, organizational redesign, sustainability, and cross-cultural variation in phygital well-being.
This article examines contemporary sustainability discourse as it is visually and spatially constructed in everyday consumption settings through marketing practices. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard's concepts of simulacra, simulation, and hyperreality, the study approaches sustainability not as a reference to material environmental conditions, but as a system of signs-meanings that produce and circulate through packaging, shelf arrangements and retail space. Using semiotics and geosemiotic methodological analysis of 290 images of packaging, supermarket shelves, and aisle arrangements in four retail stores, the article shows how narratives of “naturality simulacrum”, “pureness simulacrum”, and “ethical narrative simulacrum” are assembled and stabilised within retail spaces. These visual and spatial arrangements enable the narrative of sustainability to circulate largely at the level of representation, shaping how environmental responsibility is encountered and understood in the market. This article argues that sustainability in contemporary retail space operates effectively as a self-referential regime of sing-value through which hyperreal model of sustainability is continuously produced.
Artificial intelligence increasingly structures how consumers search, decide, and participate in markets. Yet most AI-in-marketing research adopts a firm-centric and performance-oriented perspective, offering limited theorization of its broader societal consequences. This commentary reframes AI as a socio-technical market infrastructure that redistributes power and shapes consumer agency. Drawing on macromarketing and socially responsible marketing traditions, we position consumer emancipation as a normative criterion for evaluating algorithmic markets. We develop a conceptual framework identifying transparency, fairness, and consumer control as governance mechanisms that enhance autonomy, trust, and capability, thereby enabling more inclusive and accountable market outcomes. By shifting attention from efficiency to emancipation, the paper advances a conceptual foundation for assessing responsible AI and outlines directions for future macromarketing research on algorithmic systems.
Elections are among the most consequential market-like systems in any democracy, yet macromarketing has never systematically analysed them. DeQuero-Navarro et al. argued that advancing macromarketing's understanding of market-society relationships requires interdisciplinary collaboration that broadens the field's analytical scope and extends its conceptual resources to scholars working in adjacent domains. This paper answers that call by demonstrating how macromarketing's foundational principles can be applied to political communication systems to generate analytical insights that neither political marketing nor electoral scholarship has been able to produce alone. Drawing on Mittelstaedt et al.'s foundational principles, Layton's marketing systems framework, and Meade and Nason's systems-theoretic macromarketing, the paper develops the Electoral Marketing System (EMS)-an integrated conceptual framework specifying actors, communication flows, structural moderators, emotional mechanisms, and emergent outcomes-as a pedagogical tool for applying macromarketing principles in electoral contexts. The EMS is not a parallel framework to the political marketing system literature; rather, the political marketing system is best understood as one important subset operating within the broader EMS, just as the advertising industry operates within the larger marketing system. Nigeria's 2023 presidential election illustrates the EMS framework across four temporal stages-from pre-primary antecedent forces through electoral marketplace constitution, campaign period, election event, and post-election feedback effects-demonstrating how unprecedented digital mobilisation coexisted with 26.71% voter turnout, the lowest in the Fourth Republic. The engagement-participation gap is shown to be an emergent property of the EMS rather than a failure of individual campaigns, and information disorder is identified as a systemic externality of competitive mobilisation. A five-direction research agenda and a full instructional guide for educators conclude, mapping opportunities for macromarketing scholarship in electoral contexts.
Social marketing faces interconnected challenges across identity formation, educational provision, and global knowledge representation. Existing scholarship treats these as separate problems, but this paper argues they are manifestations of competing institutional logics: market logic privileging commercial orientation, academic logic rewarding methodological conformity, and public welfare logic demanding transformative social impact. Underpinning these tensions are epistemological questions about what counts as valid knowledge and whose knowledge is recognised, questions that existing frameworks have not systematically addressed. We introduce the Disciplinary Advancement Framework for Social Marketing (DAfSM), which provides analytical tools for engaging with these tensions deliberately rather than reproducing them unconsciously. DAfSM integrates institutional logics theory to diagnose competing pressures, institutional work to specify how actors create, maintain, and disrupt disciplinary structures, and reflective equilibrium as a method for iteratively navigating tensions that resist permanent resolution. Drawing on philosophical accounts of knowledge as socially situated and contextually grounded, the framework distinguishes structural exclusion from paradigmatic exclusion as two analytically separate mechanisms through which Global South and community knowledge is marginalised within the discipline. An illustrative application to the African Social Marketing Association (AfSMA) demonstrates the framework's diagnostic and generative capacity across identity, educational, and epistemic domains. The paper contributes a theoretically grounded framework that moves beyond mapping disciplinary tensions to enabling strategic engagement with them, with transferable implications for applied disciplines facing analogous contradictions between institutional legitimacy and transformative capacity.
Sustainability-oriented markets increasingly depend on environmental communication to coordinate trust, legitimacy, and responsible exchange. However, the fast expansion of sustainability claims across digitally mediated markets has intensified concerns regarding greenwashing and declining informational reliability. Existing research predominantly explains greenwashing as either deceptive corporate communication or a consumer perception outcome, offering limited understanding of the broader informational conditions that weaken sustainability-oriented market systems. To address this gap, the present study reconceptualizes greenwashing as a condition of sustainability signal failure, where sustainability claims lose their capacity to reliably communicate substantive environmental commitment. Using signaling theory, institutional theory, and macromarketing perspectives, this study introduces sustainability signal diagnosticity as a core explanatory mechanism reflecting the inferential reliability of sustainability communication. The study further develops a configurational framework explaining how structural signal deficiencies, interpretive processes, and institutional conditions interact to undermine informational integrity within contemporary marketing systems.
This article argues that the defining challenge of the artificial intelligence (AI) era is not technological displacement per se, but a more fundamental structural discontinuity: the progressive erosion of scarcity conditions in specific cognitive and informational domains, and the resulting destabilization of institutions still organized around the assumption of generalized scarcity. Drawing on macromarketing theory, institutional economics, and sociological perspectives on identity and meaning, I develop the concept of the Abundance Shock, a condition in which the AI-driven near-zero marginal cost of producing knowledge, content, and cognitive work undermines the foundational assumptions of market systems, labor institutions, and social identities. I identify four interdependent mechanisms through which this shock propagates: (1) production-labor decoupling, (2) identity disruption, (3) epistemic fragmentation, and (4) institutional lag. I further propose that the real scarcity of the AI age is not informational or material, but cognitive and moral, centered on judgment, trust, and the capacity to define what constitutes a good life. I conclude by drawing implications for macromarketing scholarship, particularly around the adequacy of market-based solutions to abundance-era challenges and the need for governance frameworks that foreground societal well-being over efficiency optimization.
Macromarketing scholars have long explored connections between marketing, markets, and society, especially in contexts where consumption habits significantly impact environmental and social outcomes. Our work contributes to this discussion by investigating how social structures and ethical identities affect sustainable shifts in food consumption - particularly the transition from conventional meat to cultured meat (also known as clean meat or lab-grown meat). In the first of two studies with US consumers, we demonstrate that social class positively affects willingness to consume cultured meat, primarily for individuals with higher moral identity symbolization. In the second study, we find that higher-class consumers, compared to lower-class consumers, are more motivated to distinguish themselves, which explains their willingness to try cultured meat, particularly when they have high moral identity symbolization. These findings are valuable to macromarketing researchers, consumers, managers, and public policymakers.
This paper addresses a wicked problem in algorithmic consumer culture, as originally theorized by Rittel and Webber and applied to macromarketing by Wooliscroft: AI-enhanced personalization systems, designed to serve consumer preferences, frequently undermine the consumer agency that constitutes the foundation of market emancipation. We adopt Laczniak and Murphy's conception of socially responsible marketing as marketing practice that prioritizes stakeholder welfare, ethical conduct, and societal benefit over narrow firm interests. Drawing upon authenticity theory, Nissenbaum's contextual integrity framework, an updated privacy calculus framework, psychological reactance theory, and posthumanist perspectives on human-AI relations, we develop the Consumer Emancipation Framework (CEF) to explain when AI liberates consumers and when it oppresses them. The framework identifies two competing pathways. The Emancipatory Pathway operates when algorithmic transparency is high, relationship authenticity is preserved, and privacy-personalization tension remains low; under these conditions, AI amplifies consumer agency by reducing information asymmetry and enhancing autonomous choice. The Oppressive Pathway activates when transparency is absent, authenticity is violated, and privacy costs exceed personalization benefits; here, AI degrades consumer agency through manipulation, surveillance, and dark patterns that exploit cognitive vulnerabilities. We introduce three constructs essential for understanding consumer welfare under algorithmic governance: algorithmic transparency, relationship authenticity, and privacy-personalization tension. Seven propositions specify boundary conditions, with particular attention to how algorithmic literacy, consumer vulnerability, and structural inequalities moderate these relationships. Following Sharma et al. multi-level framework for socially responsible consumption, we map these constructs onto consumer-centric, firm-centric, product-centric, and consumption-centric dimensions, demonstrating how micro-level agency dynamics produce macro-level market system consequences. The framework addresses distributional consequences, recognizing that the Global South and marginalized populations may systematically experience the Oppressive Pathway due to algorithmic bias, digital literacy constraints, and colonial data extraction patterns. Drawing on Bauman's analysis of moral dilemmas under liquid modernity, we theorize how fluid techno-human landscapes destabilize traditional frameworks for evaluating AI's impact on consumer welfare. Policy implications address algorithmic accountability and corporate digital responsibility (CDR), specifying institutional conditions necessary for AI to fulfill its emancipatory potential. The paper contributes to macromarketing theory by engaging AI as a wicked problem requiring ongoing navigation rather than definitive solution, consistent with the field's tradition of addressing complex market-society interactions.
This special issue of the Journal of Macromarketing investigates the transformative impact of digital technologies on marketing systems and broader societal outcomes, moving beyond the scope of firm-level innovation. The issue features three articles: one examining biodigital influencers in tourism; another analyzing data-driven patterns of global prosperity through the Legatum Prosperity Index; and a third exploring how market type moderates the relationship between privacy and customer welfare. Collectively, these contributions enrich macromarketing scholarship by employing interdisciplinary approaches and critically evaluating growth-centric assumptions. The editors advocate for future research in areas such as data governance, algorithmic ethics, and the far-reaching societal effects of technology-enabled marketing systems.
Markets increasingly operate through algorithmic systems exercising decision-making authority traditionally reserved for humans. This article develops the Algorithmic Sovereignty Framework to theorize how constitutive market authority, the capacity to determine what is visible, transactable, and choosable, redistributes across human-algorithmic assemblages in ways that challenge assumptions about market systems. We extend marketing systems theory to accommodate nonhuman agents that drive market evolution, exchange theory to theorize transactions completed through algorithmic mediation beyond human comprehension, and consumer sovereignty to introduce configuration sovereignty, which concerns who determines what is choosable rather than who chooses. The framework identifies five sovereignty dimensions (cognitive, temporal, informational, relational, and normative) where algorithms determine market outcomes, and it theorizes four evolutionary phases from human-dominant through hybrid configurations toward algorithmic autonomy. The analysis also reveals four novel market failures (algorithmic lock-in, preference manufacture, sovereignty asymmetries, and temporal exploitation) that compound rather than self-correct and that traditional governance cannot address.
Fashion is an important aspect of life, and impacts people's sense of belonging, well-being, self-esteem, behaviour, cognition, and emotions. However, there is a lack of understanding of how current "youthful" fashion impacts the well-being of middle-aged female consumers. This study examined the mediating role of ageing anxiety, appearance anxiety, and the moderating effects of an interest in fashion, as well as fashion spending power and age on the relationship between satisfaction with fashion clothing choices and well-being. Survey responses were collected from 252 middle-aged women residing in the United Kingdom (UK). The results showed that satisfaction with fashion clothing choices was a significant predictor of well-being, and this relationship was partly mediated by social avoidance behaviour. The model explained 19% of the variance in middle-aged women's well-being. The content analysis of open-ended responses asking about challenges middle-aged women face when shopping for clothes revealed that size, fit, and style were the main areas of concern. This cohort, overall, felt overlooked by designers, manufacturers, and retailers. Pushing middle-aged women from the market or hoping they will just fit into the "young" or "mature" category can lead them to disengage socially and from mainstream fashion brands. Therefore, it is important for the industry to reconsider its current provision and cater to the needs of this important consumer group.
Hybrid work has turned employee experience into a phygital phenomenon, in which physical and digital experiences jointly shape well-being and organizational performance. Yet existing employee experience models often treat physical and digital domains as isolated, parallel, or only partially connected, offering limited insight into how their interaction produces coherence or tension in employees lived work experiences. This conceptual article develops the Phygital Work Experience (PH-WX) framework to theorize work experience within an integrated physical and digital environment. We introduce a dual-realm conceptualization of work experience as 4Ps (Person, People, Purpose, Place) and 4Ds (Design, Data, Device, Decision) and define phygital work congruence as the degree to which the 4Ps and 4Ds align to support coherent, meaningful, and psychologically supportive work. Drawing on employee well-being research, internal market orientation, sociotechnical systems, and paradox theory, we theorize how phygital congruence and misalignment in work experience emerge across three levels: micro (broader employee experience), meso (leadership, culture, HRM, infrastructure, ethical governance), and macro (economic, technological, socio-cultural, institutional forces). The paper contributes to macromarketing by offering a human-centric lens for analyzing and designing hybrid work experiences.
