LAUSR

A little more action, please. There is no record of Elvis Presley's views on responsible marketing, but his 1968 song, “A Little Less Conversation,” could have been written as a reflection on the global marketing community’s current progress in transforming our field. At the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2015, the leaders of 193 nations adopted an ambitious set of 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) combatting poverty, inequality, and discrimination. Since then, it has been an imperative for organizations to reimagine their marketing strategy with an eye towards global impact. This is not only a matter of international policy; important shifts in stakeholder views on responsible marketing are also starting to emerge. For example, supply chain partners and end-customers across many industries are increasingly interested in end-of-life cycle initiatives, product-emission rates, product provenance, and transparency of production. These stakeholders are steadily demanding more environmentally-friendly packaging and lower carbon footprints. Further, stakeholders expect human dignity to be respected along this process. Consequently, long-term supply chain strategies are being redefined to acknowledge climate change and human rights issues in strategy formulation and execution. In turn, marketing scholars have increasingly become concerned with responsible marketing, and although these issues have not always been the focus of our scholarship, it is evident from current work that they are now. There is a growing, rich conversation involving notions of responsibility within marketing in the current scholarship base. The past decade has witnessed an expansion of concepts and empirical evidence regarding the challenges of environmental sustainability, social responsibility, (mental) health and social care, wealth disparities and poverty, nationalism and its impact on global trade, identity loss, and a wide array of unintended consequences of digitization (Hensen et al., 2016). As an academic marketing community we are well-placed to lead on relevant change across the social, economic, environmental, and political landscapes; doing so will provide further opportunities for novel contributions to marketing strategy knowledge. Moreover, there is a wider call for societal and political action through purposeful engagement with the world’s grand challenges, thereby inspiring scholars and industry to work together as partners to reimagine the very definition of effective marketing strategy. Key to successfully transforming marketing strategy is the creation of forward-looking intellectual frameworks, which can serve as springboards for future research that can inform creative and critical scholarship and practice. At this point, marketing scholars are primed to develop sustainable solutions by aligning the interests of principal stakeholders, not just shareholders, and by balancing longer-term and shorter-term benefits. The conversation about reimagining marketing strategy started with a fundamental and paradigmatic shift away from the discipline’s earlier focus on agency and transaction costs. A fruitful lens through which to continue this conversation is the emerging theorizing on stewardship (c.f., Mick et al., 2012), which can simultaneously be aligned with sustaining contributions to (or even reimagining) the bottom-line. Furthermore, and in the spirit of stewardship thinking, we recognize that the strength of extant marketing scholarship lies in its knowledge exchange and co-creation with stakeholders. This collaborative approach during the various stages of research design and execution can, and does, bring about meaningful change. It also involves * Ko de Ruyter [email protected]