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Marketing and policy researchers aiming to increase the societal impact of their scholarship should engage directly with relevant stakeholders. For maximum societal effect, this engagement needs to occur both within the research process and throughout the complex process of knowledge transfer. The authors propose that a relational engagement approach to research impact complements and builds on traditional approaches. Traditional approaches to impact employ bibliometric measures and focus on the creation and use of journal articles by scholarly audiences, an important but incomplete part of the academic process. The authors recommend expanding the strategies and measures of impact to include process assessments for specific stakeholders across the entire course of impact, from the creation, awareness, and use of knowledge to societal impact. This relational engagement approach involves the cocreation of research with audiences beyond academia. The authors hope to begin a dialogue on the strategies researchers can use to increase the potential societal benefits of their research.

This paper examines the challenges permeating the experiences and strategies of market challenged consumers (MCCs). We employ a multi-method approach, combining discourse analysis of personal reflection essays with grounded theory analysis of interview data in the context of consumers with disabilities. Findings reveal that MCCs experience both material and social marketplace challenges that shape three distinct yet interrelated tensions: desiring normality while needing accommodation, managing visibility while needing acknowledgement, and negotiating privacy while needing to participate. We demonstrate that MCCs enact coping strategies (reconciling and (re)positioning identity, counterbalancing (in)visibility, and armoring themselves) which subsequently both mitigate and reinforce inner tensions. This study argues that the marketplace must intervene, given the incessant nature of the challenges, inner tensions and resulting coping strategies, thus shifting the onus of coping from the MCC to the marketplace. We provide theoretical and managerial implications to better understand how marketplaces can alleviate MCCs’ marketplace challenges.

Race is integral to the functioning and ideological underpinnings of marketplace actions yet remains undertheorized in marketing. To understand and transform the insidious ways in which race operates, the authors examine its impact in marketplaces and how these effects are shaped by intersecting forms of systemic oppression. They introduce critical race theory (CRT) to the marketing community as a useful framework for understanding consumers, consumption, and contemporary marketplaces. They outline critical theory traditions as utilized in marketing and specify the particular role of CRT as a lens through which scholars can understand marketplace dynamics. The authors delineate key CRT tenets and how they may shape the way scholars conduct research, teach, and influence practice in the marketing discipline. To clearly highlight CRT’s overall potential as a robust analytical tool in marketplace studies, the authors elaborate on the application of artificial intelligence to consumption markets. This analysis demonstrates how CRT can support an enhanced understanding of the role of race in markets and lead to a more equitable version of the marketplace than what currently exists. Beyond mere procedural modifications, applying CRT to marketplace studies mandates a paradigm shift in how marketplace equity is understood and practiced.

Mobile phone proliferation in developing economies has arguably affected the everyday lives of subsistence consumers and entrepreneurs like no other technology in recent times. This impact is evidenced by mobile phones’ embeddedness in everyday consumption and business practices. Surprisingly, mobile phones have only minimally been incorporated into bottom-up research approaches in subsistence marketplaces and/or ethnographic transformative research methodologies and methods. To begin addressing this important gap, the authors conducted a systematic review of the literature on mobile phones and ethnography and then gained practical experience with a new bottom-up methodology called mobile phone visual ethnography (MpVE). Using research experiences as data, the authors share micro-level details about African microentrepreneurial everyday life and highlight important methodological issues associated with conducting MpVE in subsistence marketplaces. They find that MpVE affords methodological naturalism, unpacks informant perspectives of everyday life, captures human mobility within marketplaces, and begins to democratize the research process. In doing so, this article offers a new way of giving voice to subsistence marketplace populations through more active and visible participation in research.

This study presents a phenomenological inquiry into the lived experiences of discriminated consumers to understand how they liberate themselves from offline marketplace discrimination. We explore the critical role that information technology plays to facilitate this process, revealing how discriminated consumers use technology to prepare for battle offline, temporarily seek refuge online, and withdraw permanently online. Our findings have implications to the technology consumption literature by highlighting how discriminated consumers may adopt technological consumption practices that allow them to successfully navigate the marketplace.

This article discusses the concepts of omission and commission as marketplace trauma within the theoretical framework of cultural trauma theory. The authors identify the meanings and processes of the people, activities, and outcomes likely when marketplace omission and/or commission occur, as well as the factors that elevate these events from collective to cultural trauma. The authors use concepts of social structure, collective practices, and collective discourse in exploring the interconnectivity of marketplace traumas and their actors, victims, and consequences (i.e., constrained consumption, damaged marketing systems, and institutional privilege). They then leverage the same framework to propose further research and corrective actions.

Increasingly, scholars are interested in understanding the motivating factors and consequences of consumers engaging in pro-social consumer behavior. Pro-social behavior refers to behaviors that consumers engage in that may come at some cost to the self for the greater good or benefit for others; and can include behaviors such as: charitable giving, volunteering, altruistic behaviors, ethical purchasing, engagement in cause-related activities, and advocacy or activism. From an individual perspective, factors such as maintaining a positive image, self-concept, moral self-worth, or acting in one's self-interest through charitable giving may create positive feelings that encourage pro-social behaviors.

This article discusses the concepts of omission and commission as marketplace trauma within the theoretical framework of cultural trauma theory. The authors identify the meanings and processes of the people, activities, and outcomes likely when marketplace omission and/or commission occur, as well as the factors that elevate these events from collective to cultural trauma. The authors use concepts of social structure, collective practices, and collective discourse in exploring the interconnectivity of marketplace traumas and their actors, victims, and consequences (i.e., constrained consumption, damaged marketing systems, and institutional privilege). They then leverage the same framework to propose further research and corrective actions.