Sensory mapping, the process by which a sensory stimulus elicits a consumer response, is central to effective sensory marketing. Yet, research on the topic remains fragmented. First, the prevalence of construct proliferation, where a lack of distinction between a continuously growing array of similar terms, raises questions about how different types of sensory mappings should be defined. Second, sensory mappings have often been studied in isolation, even though they are interrelated in practice, where one stimulus can diverge into multiple responses and multiple stimuli can converge on a single response. Third, sensory stimuli are prone to mixed outcomes, enhancing or harming consumer evaluations. This paper addresses these challenges in two steps. First, a typology delineating sensory mappings based on sensory stimuli (physical vs. lexical) and consumer responses (sensory vs. semantic) is developed, yielding four key variants: sensory correspondence, semantic correspondence, sensory communication, and semantic communication. Second, a conceptual model is provided with propositions explaining how these sensory mapping types can be combined and how stimuli intensity and individual differences act as boundary conditions that explain mixed outcomes. Together, these frameworks underpin a future research agenda that offers directions to advance sensory marketing theory and practice.
This conceptual work investigates the emerging role of consumers as investors in various physical and digital assets. We introduce the notion of consumers’ asset monetization, defined as consumers’ orientation to monetize their asset(s) in secondary markets and benefit financially from them in the short or long term. Our work articulates the theoretical underpinnings of consumers’ asset monetization as a market phenomenon and highlights its idiosyncrasies relative to three interrelated but distinct literature streams (i.e., product reselling, consumer collecting, and resource monetization). We then set out a research agenda that proposes various psychological frameworks to understand consumers’ asset monetization journey and discusses its consequences for firms, creators, and consumers. Last, we highlight five areas of research interest for researchers and practitioners to better understand how consumers adopt an investor mindset (i.e., conceptualization, antecedents, individual-level consequences, firm responses, and ethical/financial implications arising from consumers’ asset monetization).
Marketing research increasingly addresses the role of technology in trends that grant more power to consumers, such as in their pursuit of health and well-being. When they accompany patient-centric care and consumer health initiatives for example, self-tracking (ST) technologies can function as empowering tools that enable individual autonomy and control. However, they also raise the risk of disempowerment, with negative effects for certain consumers. Amid fragmented findings and a potentially overhyped ST narrative, empowerment remains an ambiguous concept, with mixed, poorly understood potential effects. To establish more clarity about ST’s potential for both empowerment and disempowerment, the current study reports on a multidisciplinary, integrative literature review, spanning wide-ranging health and well-being ST applications. The authors in turn conceptualize ST empowerment as an overarching state and process, comprising key concepts and mechanisms that can be expressed as empowerment or disempowerment according to four dichotomies, as shaped by personal, social, and technological factors. The resulting multidimensional framework situates mixed prior findings and offers a comprehensive view of (dis)empowerment in an important consumer technology context. It advances marketing and consumer empowerment literature, particularly in technology-mediated contexts, while also offering significant implications for researchers and practitioners.
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have become part of the product portfolios of many brands, ranging from individual creators to established firms. Yet, we currently have a limited understanding of how NFTs should be designed, launched, and managed effectively over their lifecycle journey. To fill this gap, we explore the distinctive lifecycle of this novel digital product category. Rather than focusing on the macro-view of the product lifecycle at the aggregate product category level (e.g., introduction, growth, maturity, and decline), our work offers a micro-view of the lifecycle at the individual NFT level, focusing on the relevant decisions to be made and activities to be performed by a creator or a firm. Drawing on the product lifecycle management literature and field exemplars, our proposed NFT lifecycle consists of three main stages: (1) Inception (featuring content creation, minting, and dropping), (2) Circulation (involving experience, trade, and commercial exploitation), and (3) Termination (including timed expiration, regeneration, and retirement decisions). Our conceptual work contributes to the emerging literature on blockchain assets by developing an original and integrative lifecycle framework. It also offers marketers actionable insights into how to manage each of the different lifecycle stages of a decentralized digital offering like NFTs, broadening the focus from short-term activities (e.g., Inception and Circulation) to the long-term ones (e.g., Termination).
This article extends Williams, Escalas, and Morningstar’s (2022) framework of brand purpose and consumer eudaimonic well-being through an in-depth analysis of Resmed, a restorative health technology company whose mission is to create products “that people love.” We conceptualize brand purpose as organizational architecture rather than simply external positioning, showing how purpose operates through identity integration, emotional activation, and structural integration across stakeholders. We examine brand love as a relational outcome that consolidates purpose-driven mechanisms in contexts characterized by vulnerability and stigma. In restorative categories, love may emerge not from aspiration but from sustained functional restoration and dignity-preserving design. Second, we expand the framework to incorporate employee eudaimonic well-being, as Resmed reveals that purpose internalization shapes employees’ authentic pride, coordination, and enactment quality, reinforcing consumer flourishing through reciprocity loops. We further identify structural conditions, including clarity, authenticity, vulnerability intensity, and stigma visibility, that stabilize emotional pathways and strengthen durable commitment. Finally, we outline measurement implications for assessing purpose-driven systems. Together, these contributions illuminate brand purpose as a multi-level system linking consumer and employee flourishing with organizational strategy and generate interesting avenues for future research.
Responding to calls to approach marketing as a phenomenon, this commentary examines ontological, epistemological, and ethical perspectives that make marketing intelligible. The dominance of activity-centered and positivist orientations have limited the field’s capacity to articulate its underlying purpose, but adopting relational and more-than-human views allows for a conceptualization of marketing as a sociomaterial phenomenon within which knowing, being, and doing are inseparably intertwined. More-than-human flourishing then becomes marketing’s higher-order orientation, shifting attention from episodic value creation to the cultivation of conditions that sustain well-being and well-becoming over time. To ensure flourishing is more than just aspirational, care is required, as both a condition of its possibility and a manifestation of the relational and material work through which markets and ecosystems can be maintained and rendered livable. This integrated, societally grounded approach can redefine marketing’s purpose.
Marketing is again confronting foundational questions about what it fundamentally is. Responding to Grönroos’s (2026) argument that marketing’s crisis is ontological rather than methodological, this commentary engages with his call to re-anchor the discipline in a single overarching phenomenon. Building on the notion of marketing as a phenomenon of creating meaningfulness (Grönroos, 2023), the commentary examines what this phenomenological reframing implies for marketing theory. We argue that taking meaningfulness seriously destabilises core assumptions about marketing’s explanandum. To clarify what meaningful marketing theory requires, we assess marketing-indigenous meta-theories—service-dominant logic and resource-advantage theory. This assessment shows that while these frameworks offer necessary foundations, none alone can fully explain the emergence, contestation, and societal impact of meaningfulness. Instead, meaningful marketing theory benefits from a structured form of meta-theoretical pluralism in which a shared market-centric orientation provides coherence, while complementary perspectives from within and outside of marketing deepen the explanandum for meaningfulness.
Technological advances are beginning to change the timeline and finality of death, and these emerging death technologies affect the dying, survivors, and society in unprecedented ways. We systematize current, emerging, and imagined technologically mediated or enabled human-death relationships through our REAL framework, which considers three areas of death technologies: digital Remembrance, life Extension, and digital AfterLife. These technologies extend consumption beyond the consumer life cycle into a consumer death cycle, raising profound ethical and marketing questions. Based on a thematic synthesis of recurring ethical principles, we conceptualize the CARE principles—Control, Accountability, Respect, and Equity—and illustrate implications for the (future) deceased, the bereaved, providers, and policymakers. Our work offers a starting point for understanding the complex ethical and marketing challenges of death technologies and the digital afterlife by developing a conceptual and ethical framework that clarifies how these technologies are organized, embedded, and governed within market systems. We also extend foundational concepts of consumer vulnerability, co-creation, and extended self into posthumous contexts, and lays out a research agenda.
This commentary discusses a recent call to redefine marketing by focusing on its fundamental meaning and purpose. The commentary proposes three unique, defining properties of marketing that a conceptualization of the “overarching marketing phenomenon” should accommodate to resonate with both business and academia: an externally oriented value-creation mindset, an outside-in perspective, and an integrative, relational orientation.
In what has been termed the “manifesto conversation,” the question has been raised as to “how the marketing discipline will successfully use its human and institutional resources to reverse its troubled trajectory, renew itself, and meet its responsibilities to its stakeholders” (Hunt et al., 2022, p. 139). This research question is the focus of this paper. Herein we draw on stakeholder theory amplified by concepts from systems and institutional theory, to offer an approach to address this question. Using stakeholder systems theory we argue (a) that competitiveness among sub-fields operates to invoke mutual improvements for the marketing stakeholders of each sub-field, and (b) that due to the constitutive nature of systems, each necessary contribution by a given sub-field can be identified and included in sufficiently serving marketing’s stakeholders. We offer three contributions. First, we develop theory to suggest how multiple marketing constituencies might continue to pursue novel research while remaining true to the foundations of each constituency. Second, we suggest a theoretical mechanism for integration across sub-fields. Third, we offer ideas whereby marketing-discipline actors can work proactively to create, maintain, and in some cases disrupt the institutions that presently constrain the development of marketing as a core field of study in a dynamic business environment. It therefore is our hope that our analysis in this paper can serve an effectuating purpose as the marketing discipline seeks to use its human and institutional resources in connection with its troubled trajectory, to renew itself, and meet its responsibilities to its stakeholders.
Grönroos (AMS Review, 2026) notes the marketing discipline is at a critical juncture due to its fragmented and largely tactical focus, misalignment with environmental issues and the needs of businesses and society, and other shortcomings. He views the definition of marketing adopted by American Marketing Association (AMA) in 2007 (American Marketing Association, 2024) as representing the management approach, and marketing based on the management approach as myopically focused on activities without a clear purpose. Grönroos calls for an approach in which the perspective is raised from what marketing does in an activity-based framework to what marketing is at a higher level as an overarching phenomenon. He further notes that while a discussion on “what marketing would be as a phenomenon” is outside the scope of the article, it should encompass the purpose of marketing when introduced and implemented in any context. An issue of concern regarding Grönroos’ criticisms of the current state of the marketing discipline is that they are opinions and not evidence-based facts. Regarding his comments on the AMA 2007 definition of marketing, it should be viewed as one of many definitions and not as the definitive definition. Furthermore, the marketing discipline and practice would benefit from multiple definitions of marketing, including a definition that is activities focused and managerial in its orientation.
Marketing as a discipline faces critical juncture due to fragmented and largely tactical focus and misalignment with business, environmental, and societal needs. The ongoing debate in reputable marketing journals about how to resolve marketing’s dilemma has not yielded clear results. It appears to be taken for granted what marketing is. This article states that marketing based on the management approach has become myopically focused on activities without a clear purpose. The article advocates a transformative approach, in which the perspective is raised from what marketing does in an activity-based framework to what marketing is on a higher level as an overarching phenomenon. Thus, marketing’s inner meaning and purpose is in focus. Once this has been established, the choice of marketing decisions and activities should be a matter of consideration. By understanding marketing as a phenomenon, the discipline can potentially become inclusive in several ways, helping various institutions to embrace it and make it possible to reconcile conflicts between marketing’s many stakeholders and between commercial and environmental interests.
This commentary responds to Christian Grönroos’s call to reorient marketing by grounding it in the phenomenon itself rather than in activity lists. We extend his provocation by arguing that marketing must be understood as an integrated being–doing phenomenon constituted through social practices, not as an abstract essence detached from what marketers, organizations, and customers actually do. Drawing from philosophical debates on essence and action, as well as practice-theoretical perspectives, we contend that marketing emerges through recurrent processes of value formation, resource integration, and promise orchestration embedded in institutional contexts. We further argue that Grönroos’s appeal to restore demand fulfilment requires deeper engagement with the institutional and sociocultural forces that shape demand. Finally, we propose three interlocking domains: relational value creation in use, integrated promise orchestration, and institutional governance of market practices, as foundational lenses for conceptualizing marketing phenomenon. Regrounding marketing in societal and practice-based realities advances a robust, institutionally informed ontology capable of guiding research and practice in an era marked by global, ecological, and socio-economic challenges.
While convenient experiences have become the epitome of modern consumption, this has led to ecological repercussions and serves as an underpinning driver of linear economies. To understand why this connection between convenience and environmental degradation is so strong, we examine convenience as a mindset, which affects our ways of being, thinking, and doing. The prevailing individual-centric convenience mindset is characterized by a focus on minimizing resource expenditure for personal benefits—often leading to short-term gratification—which inhibits the transition to regenerative circular economies. The individual-centric convenience mindset adheres to an outdated marketing perspective, emphasizing economic exchange rather than contemporary marketing that prioritizes value creation and seeks to extend benefits beyond individuals to society as a whole. The theorizing of convenience has accordingly failed to sufficiently evolve. To address this problem, we propose an alternative collective-centric convenience mindset grounded in stewardship principles, where individuals prioritize collective benefits and long-term sustainability over immediate personal gain. Our paper reviews and critiques current convenience conceptualizations and advocates for a paradigm shift toward a collective-centric approach. This study expands the theoretical scope of the convenience phenomenon from an individual-level phenomenon to the collective level. We contribute to the theoretical foundations of sustainability in marketing theory and practice by offering an alternative that aligns individual actions with broader societal and ecological imperatives.
This study explores the distinctive characteristics of and interconnections between market orientation (MO) and customer orientation (CO), delving into their conceptualizations and measurement scales. The primary objective is to disentangle the relationship between these constructs, identifying diverse theoretical approaches along the MO and CO continuum and presenting new integrative conceptualizations of both constructs. Through a comprehensive search of the literature, we amass 155 articles from sources in the Web of Science and cross references, each of which we thoroughly examine and categorize, enabling analysis of the field and derivation of conclusions. Critically, we map the evolution of conceptualizations and scales for both constructs, highlighting ambiguity in the literature. We also characterize MO and CO along cultural vs. behavioral and individual vs. organizational dimensions. Additionally, our research identifies three primary streams addressing the relationship between MO and CO: (1) treating the concepts as synonymous, (2) viewing CO as part of MO, and (3) conceptualizing MO and CO as independent constructs. Our major contribution is the development of integrative conceptualizations of MO and CO, grounded in the key characterizations uncovered. Finally, we propose a research agenda for the further development of our findings and theoretical perspectives.
Poverty alleviation programs aim to enhance well-being, but they may also unintentionally undermine the very outcomes they aim to promote. Previous research has restricted the examination of negative unintended consequences, or boomerang effects, to consumption contexts such as warning labels. In this paper, we build on theories of boomerang effects and marketplace deprivation in developing countries delineating a taxonomy of effects that extends beyond current conceptualizations in developed Western countries. Using insights from 44 scientific articles on poverty alleviation programs, we build a framework demonstrating how boomerang effects emerge unintentionally in programs meant to curb poverty. These include tangible livelihood and consumption boomerang effects, and embedded within these, intangible cognitive and emotional effects. We contribute to theory by providing a first effort at classifying boomerang effects beyond psychological reactance applicable to poverty alleviation programs in developed Western countries. We conclude by using the emergent framework to suggest pathways for future research streams to aid policy makers in creating effective poverty alleviation programs.
