Contemporary marketplaces are increasingly organised around the neutralisation of environmental temporality—replacing seasonal rhythms with permanent availability and frictionless access. This think piece suggests that such temporal colonisation encounters an irreducible ontological limit: the rhythmic nature of embodied existence. Drawing on phenomenological and rhythmanalytic resources, I propose the notion of the somatic pendulum to think through consumer desire not as a stable force but as a fundamentally oscillatory phenomenon. Rather than treating markets as simply atemporal, I argue that they actively engineer and manipulate temporal experience—and that this engineering collides with the body’s irreducible rhythmicity, producing what I tentatively call amplitude decay: the progressive dampening of desire’s oscillatory ground. I close by opening a speculative agenda for further inquiry into embodied temporality as a productive terrain for consumer research.
Marketing agility (MA) is considered the future of marketing, yet the literature lacks conceptual, construct, and theoretical clarity, impeding knowledge accumulation and effective operationalization. By adopting a problematization approach, we propose that MA is not a de novo concept and that its components play distinct roles. Drawing on an analysis of 103 peer-reviewed articles yielding 20 MA definitions, we disentangle MA from adjacent concepts and advance an action-attribute architecture that distinguishes between what actions are taken (sensemaking, responsiveness, and iteration) and how these actions are enacted (proactiveness, flexibility, and speed). We define MA as the entity’s ability to iterate between sensemaking and responding to customer needs and market changes, enacted proactively, flexibly, and with speed , and frame it as a dynamic capability. We propose a measurement architecture to guide future operationalization and highlight inherent tensions among MA components that require careful calibration rather than simple maximization.
This essay achieves three objectives. First, we present a novel theorization of inclusion and exclusion based on three premises: inclusion and exclusion are not separate constructs but co-constitutive forces; inclusion and exclusion are inseparable from the power structures that govern them; and the notion of inclusion, and by association, exclusion has been explicitly politicized by hierarchical power regimes around the globe. Second, we introduce Wilkerson’s (2020) Caste framework which conceptualizes eight structural “pillars” through which societies construct and sustain arbitrary hierarchies that result in arbitrary processes of inclusion and exclusion. Third, we contextualize the accepted papers within Wilkerson’s framework, mapping them onto seven of the eight pillars, In doing so, we show the framework’s power to conceptualize inclusion and exclusion in marketing theory while also revealing gaps for future research. We believe Wilkerson’s framework will effectively frame existing articles and help scholars advance their understanding of inclusion and exclusion in marketing.
Relationships today are increasingly diverse and technologically mediated, rendering traditional marketing theories of connection insufficient. This commentary argues that marketing must realign its theories with contemporary digital life. It contrasts traditional "market relationships" (social connections embedded in economic exchange) with digitally mediated relationships that are co-produced by interfaces, algorithms, and platforms. Reconceptualizing relationships as technocultural and infrastructural phenomena, it situates them along a continuum ranging from human-human through human-machine to machine-machine interaction. Whereas traditional theory treats relationships as dyadic, human-centered, and narratively coherent, digital mediation reveals them to be networked, episodic, and distributed across human and nonhuman actors. This shift produces a central double movement: the enduring human need for connection is increasingly organized through emergent technocultural practices while simultaneously captured and commodified within technocapitalist systems. The commentary examines these ambivalent flows of empowerment and extraction, including the hybridization of connection through AI and other nonhuman actors. It calls for a renewed marketing theory that moves beyond engagement to interrogate the infrastructures of intimacy and governance shaping contemporary connection and highlights the need for methods such as netnography and related approaches capable of tracing distributed agency and lived experience within these systems.
Building on and extending Susie Scott’s theoretical lens of social nothingness, our paper examines how people in the English town of Wigan create meaning within a living condition of persistent “nothingness”. To facilitate our theorisation of social nothingness, we draw on ethnographic accounts of participants’ lived experiences in Wigan, a post-industrial town characterised by long-term economic scarcity, and enduring sociocultural and geopolitical insignificance. Rather than treating nothingness as momentary and aesthetic consumer choice, we consider it as a persistent and normalised lived reality continually negotiated and navigated through acts of accepting , disregarding and wandering . In doing so, our study extends understandings of consumer intentionality by moving beyond the dichotomy of commissive and omissive acts, toward the intersections and ambiguities between them. We also argue that transformation and progress in consumer culture is not always necessarily overt and positive; experiences of being ‘stuck’ or ‘lost’ can also serve as important sources of meaning making in consumer life.
