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This paper reviews recent developments in marketing-related sustainable business practices (SBP) that macromarketing scholars have researched and debated for four decades. Such SBPs should be regarded as positive steps toward a future where business does more good than harm in society.

Using the approach of a literature review, this paper highlights the actions of entrepreneurs and firms to implement SBPs resulting from analysis of the interplay between markets, marketing and society. Such analysis is in the tradition of macromarketing scholarship.

The study identifies important developments about an important shift toward adopting SBPs among many firms, as well as among consumers − especially, in developed countries of the world.

The study suggests that taking a macromarketing view offers scholars a broad lens on current complex marketplace phenomena that will prove effective in better understanding sustainability issues.

The results of the study underline the value of macromarketing scholarship through the last four decades. By being daring enough to consider other stakeholders other than marketers and owners of firms, macromarketers have provided scholars a more holistic understanding of business’ role in society.

Today, enlightened practitioners who utilize knowledge from macromarketing scholarship can gain a competitive advantage as they navigate markets increasingly influenced by a wider set of stakeholders. Such influential stakeholders include partner firms, employees, society and local communities, NGOs, media, government, as well as the environment and future generations. Scholars can gain perspective on the phenomena they investigate with such a macromarketing lens.

In today’s hypercompetitive, digital-first, knowledge-based economy, organizational creativity has never been more important as a potential source of competitive advantage. The foundation stone for every innovation is an idea and all ideas are born of creativity. The innovation process thus starts with creativity and the new ideas it yields are ideally based on insights that will lead ultimately to novel outcomes (such as new products, services, experiences or business models) and thereby to a sustainable competitive advantage. In established businesses, until relatively recently, creativity was called on only for specific, often high-profile occasions, for ‘hackathons’ or for major ‘innovation jams’, but today it is an essential, everyday necessity of routine work. However, attaining the right level of creativity from within is a challenge for many organizations and so they need to establish an appropriate and effective way to import it into their teams, projects and, ultimately, culture. The arts are a pure, unadulterated form of creativity. Mindsets, processes and practices from the arts can give organizational creativity a significant boost and can potentially offset the creative deficit in an organization. Here, the illustrative cases and practices that demonstrate how the arts can have a positive impact on business are examined.

International students make valuable educational and economic contributions in higher education institutions (HEIs) all across the world. They contribute to the diversity and add different perspective in classrooms. Attracting international students is one of the objectives of HEIs. International students being present all over the world access information about the university online. Hence, all the relevant information must be available on the HEI website. Institutions are also present on social media platforms for interaction purposes. The owned media, including website, social media, discussion forums, etc. of institutions must be regularly monitored and analysed. Equally important is to analyse what students are discussing online about institutions, that is, what are their sentiments. This chapter is an attempt to develop a guide for HEI to draw the interest of international students for an institution through web analytics and social listening. Web analytics will help in understanding the behaviour of the visitor to the HEI website. Key performance indicators that will help in achieve the objective of attracting international students will be identified. On the other hand, analysing social listening on different platforms will help in understanding international students’ perspectives towards a specific institution.

Top management support is recognized as the most critical factor for the success of large information system (IS) projects. However, getting this support is often difficult, because top management has multiple priorities and one has to compete with others to obtain such support. Political maneuvering is thus an integral and necessary part of the process of obtaining top management support. In this chapter the authors review current research on this topic and organize and synthesize our findings into a framework. The authors then propose four specific strategies which can be used to obtain top management support, including the following: (1) social capital, (2) social engagement, (3) rational persuasion, and (4) exchange strategies. While the authors argue that all four strategies should be applied, the specific circumstances in which they should be applied vary. A two-stage process is proposed that identifies the appropriate criteria for determining the most appropriate strategy. The criteria are: (1) the type of top management support needed (i.e., durable vs immediate) and (2) the level of top management-project team trust (i.e., high vs low).

This paper reflects on the development of Consumer Culture Theory, both as a field of research and as an institutional classification, since the publication of Arnould and Thompson (2005).

This paper takes a conceptual/historical orientation that is based upon the authors’ experiences over the course of the 10-year CCT initiative (including numerous conversations with fellow CCT colleagues).

The authors first discuss key benchmarks in the development of the CCT community as an organization. Next, the authors highlight key intellectual trends in CCT research that have arisen since the publication of their 2005 review and discuss their implications for the future trajectories of CCT research.

The paper by Arnould and Thompson (2005) has proven to be influential in terms of systematizing and placing a widely accepted disciplinary brand upon an extensive body of culturally oriented consumer research. The CCT designation has also provided an important impetus for institution building. The 10-year anniversary of this article (and not incidentally the CCT conference from which the papers in this volume hail) provides a unique opportunity for the authors to comment upon the broader ramifications of their original proposals.

The basic thesis espoused in this chapter is that a discourse analytic approach, that explores managers’ stories, is equally valid as a more typical case study approach that seeks confirmatory data. Depth interviews with industrial network participants are conducted and described; interviews where managers are encouraged to talk of their lived experiences, beliefs, attitudes, and intentions. Specifically, this case study presents a qualitative exploration of identity processes in industrial networks, in particular social constructions of Indian modernity. The analysis suggests what these constructions mean for the management of buyer–seller relationships (cf. Bagozzi, 1995). The study also reflects calls for more empirical research to be undertaken to improve understanding of contemporary marketing practices, especially in large emerging market economies such as India and Brazil (Dadzie, Johnston, & Pels, 2008). Discursive data were collected in the form of transcripts from semi-structured interviews with a variety of managerial participants involved in trade between New Zealand (NZ) and India. All the participants are Indian, with interviews taking place in 2006 in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai. Interviews were conducted in English; with 23 individuals representing organizations operating in the lumber, wool, horticulture, dairy, engineering, IT, tourism, and education industries, they lasted between 45 and 90 minutes, and were recorded on audio and video media. The study goes some way toward addressing the dominant Western perspective prevalent in most studies of business relationships, and shows how discourse analysis can provide a rich analytical perspective on business-to-business relationships.

The purpose of this chapter is fivefold. First, it highlights that, despite apparent progress, business in general, and marketing in particular, has made little impact upon environmental sustainability. Second, it offers four explanations for the persistent challenges that contribute to this lack of meaningful progress. Third, it presents two theoretical lenses (i.e., assemblage theory and socio-ecological systems theory) for viewing environmental sustainability from new perspectives. Fourth, it offers a mid-range theory, biomimicry, to bridge the gap between these higher-level theories and managerial decisions on the ground. Finally, it offers implications and ideas for future research based on these persistent challenges and new perspectives.

Our paper is theoretical in focus. We offer a conceptual analysis of persistent challenges facing business efforts in environmental sustainability and suggest useful lenses to integrate marketing decisions more closely with our natural environment.

We present biomimicry as an actionable framework that seeks inspiration from nature and also explicitly grounds marketing decisions in the natural world.

Our paper draws attention to the challenges facing firms seeking to achieve better performance in environmental sustainability. In addition, it offers a set of fresh theoretical perspectives as well as future issues for scholarly research in this domain.

Our work is designed to be provocative; it articulates reasons why business efforts in environmental sustainability do not scale to meaningful impact upon our planet and explores theoretical lenses by which those efforts could be more impactful.