Imagining post-marketing: Neo-animist resource circulation and value cocreation

The research question that drives this research is what kind of marketing can we imagine in a future in which the capitalist market economy is dethroned from its dominant position? The paper’s purpose is thus to suggest a path to a future eco-economy (Helkkula & Arnould, 2022). These goals lead first to a succinct critique of managerial marketing’s axioms; second, to a concise synthesis of neo-animist principles derived from the recent ontological turn in anthropology. From there, the paper examines three relational modes through which animists organize resource circulation and value cocreation, and contemporary manifestations of practices and systems that show the enduring significance of gifting, reciprocal exchange, and predatory symbiosis to resource circulation and value cocreation. These examples can prefigure the kind of neo-animist eco-economic system we can imagine in a post-marketing world. Directions for future research build from the strategic steps towards a neo-animist post marketing systems and the challenges identified within prefigurative experiments in post-marketing resource circulation and value cocreation.