Reimagining How Meaningfulness Can be Reconciled With Marketing

Abstract

There are continuing calls for marketing to have greater individual life-changing relevance and social impact. In this paper, we address this phenomenon and discuss how meaningfulness can significantly augment the legitimacy of marketing by (1) empowering practitioners and scholars to expand their horizontal vision in combating temporal and spatial myopia and elevating the scale of the marketing processes for creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings, and (2) balancing firm-interest versus customer-interest and answering a critical question of why firms exist beyond making profits. We will then provide avenues for future research directions.