How Marketing Transforms in Flourishing Futures

Abstract

As a discipline, marketing will need to shift as businesses and other institutions respond to the numerous crises now facing the world—either proactively towards transformative sustainable marketing, as it has been termed, or reactively in an effort to sustain business as usual. This paper argues that proactive transformation towards fostering flourishing for all will keep the discipline healthy and viable. That transformation, however, requires significant rethinking of marketing’s core paradigm, purposes, and the performance metrics by which it is measured, which in turn influence key aspects marketing practice (including processes, procedures, and policies) and related power structures. All of these shifts will be emergent and hence unpredictable (though core questions can be considered as preparation), because of the nature of the complexly wicked context in which systemic change occurs.