Marketing Efficiency of Autarkic Systems: The Case of North Korea

The issue of marketing efficiency, or how to better transform inputs into outputs within a marketing system, has always occupied a special place in the macromarketing literature. The concept of marketing efficiency has not been studied in closed and isolated systems that exhibit distinctive behavioral patterns compared to conventional open systems and can explain important and understudied marketing phenomena, including autarky. This study challenges some of the conventional premises of marketing systems by defining autarky as a closed marketing system that 1) operates with the specific purpose of propaganda in a relatively predictable and efficient manner; 2) has minimal, though not entirely absent, interaction with the international environment; and 3) involves participants (actors) who do not engage in voluntary exchanges with one another but rather collectively, as well as individually, adhere consistently to the self-reliance ideology. We demonstrate how a classical thermodynamic model (i.e., the Carnot cycle for maximum energy efficiency) can be metaphorically associated with the behavior of the North Korean autarkic system to better understand the long-term efficiency of its propaganda machine. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to develop a holistic metaphorical framework for exploring the efficiency of an autarkic system and to establish common criteria for measuring relationships between autarkic properties and autarkic processes.