Hacking the Marketing Education System: Using Macromarketing and the Circular Economy to Make a Better World

Abstract

We need to “hack the system” to infuse environmental and social issues into marketing education. This requires reconfiguration and restructuring of marketing education, as expectations of key stakeholders—students, businesses, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), governments, communities, and the environment—have changed to demand social impact and systemic thinking. However, pressing collectivewell-being issues, which treat each person as a whole within their context, are still underrepresented in the curricula. Climate change, pandemics, racism, discrimination, social justice, poverty, mental health, and capitalism, along with political tension and division, are the top issues among young adults today (Annie & Casey Foundation, 2021; Jenkins & Galvin, 2020). Such change implores educators and marketers to engage in macro-level thinking in the traditionally taught managerialist (micro) subject of marketing. The largescale action required for curriculum change is only possible with equally substantial changes in mindset. Through a Macromarketing lens, marketing educators can hack the system and create real change. They can do this by overhauling the marketing micromanagement rhetoric that currently dominates the curricula of business schools. Macromarketing is the study of marketing systems. Specifically, Macromarketing considers the functioning of marketing systems and how these marketing systems interact with society (Hunt, 1981). By focusing on this interaction, Macromarketing scholars have investigated a range of outcomes, such as (a) the effects of externalities (costs or benefits of economic activities experienced by “unrelated” third parties), (b) economic development, (c) poverty alleviation, (d) globalization, (e) sustainability (including consumption), (f) quality of life, (g) distributive justice, (h) consumer vulnerability, (i) natural and human-induced disasters, and (j) marketing ethics and responsibility (DeQuero-Navarro et al., 2020). The “purpose of Macromarketing is to save the world” (Fisk, 2001, p. 121), that is, to envision a sustainable, ethical, peaceful, and equitable world. Thus, key to Macromarketing is sustainability—in its broadest and most holistic definition (Mittelstaedt et al., 2014). It is with this in mind that we introduce this special issue on Hacking the System: Sustainability and Macromarketing in Marketing Education. The aim of this special issue is to add to available resources with scholarship on envisioning, proposing, and providing evidence for “hacking” marketing education for the benefit of society, students, business, and educators. To introduce this special issue, we begin by exploring the status quo of marketing education and efforts toward reshaping it through Systems Thinking and Sustainable Education approaches. We argue for a circular economy framework with accountability as an embedded guiding principle. Last, we provide pedagogical suggestions based on transformative learning (advanced in Sustainable Education; Sterling, 2011) to unteach the Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP) elements of marketing.