We Get by with a Little Help from Our Friends: Progress Toward the Future and an Invitation to Approach Policy Questions Through Novel Perspectives

Abstract

At the midpoint of our JPP&M editorship, we reflect on the journey we have shared with the marketing and public policy (MPP) community. We continue to face challenging times together, as scholars and as individuals. Since the beginning of our tenure in 2020, the world has become increasingly volatile and uncertain. The global COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect the lives of every individual, community, and nation on Earth. We have been experiencing racial and political tensions in the United States and abroad (Chavez 2020). In recent years, we have also watched crackdowns on human rights around the world as individuals seek to exert their need for freedom, dignity, and identity (Human Rights Watch 2021). In February of 2022, Russia attacked Ukraine, in a war that has to date resulted in injury or death to thousands of civilian children, women, and men and has triggered fears of widerscale global conflict. As world temperatures continue to rise, we also witnessed the Antarctic Conger ice shelf (a mass the size of New York City) plunge into the sea and effects of a sustained drought in the southwestern United States directly constraining water (and food) supplies in several U.S. states; these are merely two of a plethora of indicators that provide increasingly dramatic evidence of global climate change and the urgency to counteract it (Borenstein 2022; Fountain 2021; Miller 2019). The world is processing these events through the lens of an infodemic, in which consumers are bombarded with accurate and inaccurate information (Mende, Vallen, and Berry 2021), as well as attempts to restrict access to information altogether (Ben-Hassine 2018; Bernstein 2022). These events, and the personal touchpoints of their occurrence to each of us as individuals, have left us disrupted, distracted, concerned, or worse. Indeed, the 2021 Gallup Global Emotions Report shows that across the world, people are “sadder, angrier, more worried, and more stressed-out” than at any time since the survey began in 2006 (Gallup 2021). We acknowledge that global events and those that touch us at home have added to the challenges we face as scholars, teachers, colleagues, coauthors, reviewers, and mentors. We understand and we empathize. In reponse, we as Editors strive to take positive action in ways that we hope will help. We are mindful of these myriad challenges when interacting with authors, reviewers, associate editors, and community members. We also ask: What can we do, as an MPP community, to use our knowledge, skills, and professional connections to collectively solve pressing problems and help make the world better? We argue that public policy and the greater public good has never needed marketing scholarship more. We continue to believe that the work our community is doing, including your contributions to JPP&M and the MPP collective, makes an important difference. When we took the helm of JPP&M, we shared our strategic vision. Its foundation is guided by a philosophy of inclusivity, and we believed that this approach would heighten the quality of the discourse in this already outstanding journal in rigor, relevance, and impact. We identified four key areas of focus: (1) to continue JPP&M’s leadership as the journal that publishes research that “makes a difference in the world,” (2) to be intentionally inclusive toward diverse, underrepresented, and global perspectives, (3) to encourage impact and business relevance, and (4) to heighten policy relevance through a variety of marketing lenses (Martin and Scott 2021). We have taken several actions to support this strategic plan, which we share here to illustrate some of the ways we have engaged the MPP community and its ability make a positive difference. With these examples, we strengthen our commitment to inclusivity, and in doing so, we invite you to get involved. This editorial will highlight several paths we hope you might consider toward engaging with us.