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intangible consumer, or does the field itself need to transform? Our journey explores
what lies beyond the traditional customer, or more specifically, consumer, whom
we have tentatively conceptualised as the “post-consumer.” En route, we selectively
examine pathways taken, and pathways not taken, with a view to informing options
facing contemporary marketing.
In odd ways, this specific 21st century quest resembles the medieval Ultima Thule
as a place beyond the borders of the known world – a place from which there is no
return, only further journey into the transformation (Leonard 1972). Before that
quest, however, we benchmark using two recent books involving of one of marketing’s
most influential figures, Philip Kotler, who has undertaken a similar mapping of
pathways to the present and routes to the future. The first of Kotler’s contributions
focuses more on the instability of the present. Indeed, Kotler and Caslione’s (2009)
Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence goes so
far as to coin the term “chaotics” to convey how the innovative and disordered nature
of the age interweaves with business as a whole: “Turbulence is the new normality,
punctuated by periodic and intermittent spurts of prosperity and downturn – including
extended downturns amounting to recession or even depression” [italics in original] (p.
xii). The second of his contributions, Kotler, Kartajaya, and Setiawan’s (2010) book
entitled Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit, implies an
utterly intangible destination. In effect, their subtitle’s reference to the Human Spirit
dematerialises the post-customer, or post-consumer, in a way that signals the possible
disappearance of the embodied consumer. So how did the author of the seminal
Marketing Management (Kotler, 1st Edition published 1967, 13th Edition published
2008, with a China adaptation in 2008, and a Europe adaptation in 2009) arrive at
such a conclusion?
Kotler et al.’s (2010) recent intervention conceptualises the present as Marketing
3.0 and offers a table (p. 6), which sets out its distinctions from the two preceding
historical stages. The other two stages are categorised as Marketing 1.0 and Marketing
2.0, and all three are distinguished along the following lines:
Marketing 1.0 is founded on products and called ‘Product-centric Marketing’, Marketing
2.0 is founded on customers and called ‘Consumer-oriented Marketing’, and Marketing
3.0 is founded on the human spirit and called “Values-driven Marketing”. Each stage has
different objectives, enabling forces, and value propositions so that 1.0’s aim is to ‘Sell
products’ and is enabled by the ‘Industrial Revolution’ to be ‘Functional’ in value; 2.0’s
aim is to ‘Satisfy and retain the consumers’ and is enabled by ‘Information Technology’ to
be ‘Functional and emotional’ in value; and 3.0’s aim is to ‘Make the world a better place’
and is enabled by ‘New wave technology’ to be ‘Functional, emotional, and spiritual’
(adapted from Kotler et al. 2010, p. 6).
Space prevents a more elaborate description of Kotler et al.’s (2010) justification of
these stages but, like most historical stage arguments, its force is directed towards
influencing the present. Bearing this in mind, and in order to have points of reference
for our different staging of consciousness, we present the three major factors that they
identify as shaping the crucial third stage of 3.0. Two of their factors are relatively
commonplace across the management and marketing literature: firstly, “new wave
technology [which] becomes the major driver for the birth of Marketing 3.0” (Kotler
et al. 2010, p. 5) and has them characterise the time as “The Age of Participation and
Collaborative Marketing” (p. 5); and secondly, globalisation, which has them also
characterise the time as “The Age of Globalization Paradox and Cultural Marketing”
(p. 12).
3. Varey and McKie Staging consciousness: marketing 3.0, post-consumerism and future pathways 323
Less common is their wholesale adoption, which draws heavily from the work of
Richard Florida (2002, 2005), of “the rise of creative society” (Kotler et al. 2010, p. 17)
and their associated third characterisation of the time as “The Age of Creative Society
and Human Spirit Marketing” (p. 17). From this third factor, the matching Marketing
3.0 becomes “Collaborative, Cultural, and Spiritual” (p. 21) as a “more advanced
collaboration takes place when consumers themselves play the key role in creating
value through the cocreation of products and services” (p. 10). To accommodate the
third stage and develop “culturally relevant” campaigns, “marketers must understand
something about anthropology and sociology” (Kotler et al. 2010, p. 15). They are
also recommended to market the mission to consumers through storytelling and
metaphors (pp. 60-63). Kotler et al. (2010) practice what they preach in using
metaphors and stories to “sell” their view of the evolution of marketing 3.0, and we
follow them in seeking to present our alternative stages of consciousness through a
different historical narrative and a different set of metaphors clustered around ideas
of travel (i.e. moving from one place to another).
NAVIGATING BOUNDARIES BY OTHER POST-CONSUMER
GUIDEBOOKS: TRAINS AND BOATS AND PLANES
We start by borrowing a Burt Bacharach-Hal David song title referring to three
modes of transport: Trains and Boats and Planes. Each of them enables the crossing
of boundaries, literally and metaphorically, in the physical (mental) limits and the
associated discursive options of movement: by following existing tracks; by charting
waterways; and by flying over indeterminable tracts of land and sea – see also
McLuhan (1964) and Vickers (1983) on the use of mental tools and extensions.
In our convergence of social movements (challenging established modes of business
and government behaviours) and consciousness movements (changing lives and
cultures), in which each is part of a larger whole, we also align our brief history with
a transformational change process. However, through the metaphor of moving across
mental boundaries in our metaphorical plane and boat and train, we reference three
defining books: in the first, a “Turning Point” (Capra 1983) is reached in a plane
when it stalls as increased air resistance and decreased lift coincide; in the second,
in a riding of The Third Wave (Toffler 1980) into a fully marketised society, a post-
industrial value set comes to dominate; and in the third, The Cluetrain Manifesto,
self-styled revolutionaries show how self-organising networked conversations make
society smarter, fragment the single mass-market, and hail the return to diversity.
The first of these three books, Capra’s (1983) The Turning Point, speaks at length of
a nearing cultural transformation – a profound shift in our social institutions, values,
and ideas. Capra sees this shifting as essential to the development of civilisations,
and suggests that social indicators for this shift are visible “symptoms of our current
crisis” (p. 7), such as a sense of alienation, an increase in mental illness, violent crime,
social disruption, and an increased interest in religious cultism. All were observable
in the decades leading up to the 1980s. Capra (1983) perceives social structures and
behaviour patterns as being so rigid that society can no longer adapt to changing
situations. This will, in turn, lead to social disintegration because society will no
longer be able to carry on the creative process of cultural evolution. Such a loss of
flexibility in a disintegrating society is accompanied by a general loss of harmony
4. 324 JCB Journal of Customer Behaviour, Volume 9
among its elements, which inevitably leads to the outbreak of social discord and
disruption (p. 9). Capra (1983) suggestively points to experiencing the early stages
of a transition, a turning point, to a new order, comprising both resonance and
dissonance among alternative value systems.
We follow Capra in locating the crisis of “post-industrialism” in our cultural
premises and values. The concepts of the entrenched ‘modernist’ mechanistic
world view do not explain the harmonious interrelatedness and interdependence
of the biological, psychological, social, and environmental world. An ecological
perspective that recognises this dynamically balanced system is necessary (see also
Capra and Pauli 1995; Goldsmith 1992). This will require a fundamentally holistic
conception of reality, in terms of thoughts, perceptions, and values. It also provides
an explanation for the shift to revaluing tangible aspects (downwards) and intangible
aspects (upwards) in financial terms that Leadbeater’s (2000) Living on Thin Air: The
New Economy captures so graphically: most of us “make our money from thin air: we
produce nothing that can be weighed, touched or easily measured” (p. xi). Leadbeater
(2000) further observes that contemporary outputs are no longer “stockpiled at
harbours, stored in warehouses or shipped in railway cars” (p. ix) and that livings are
earned “providing service, judgement, information and analysis, [so that] . . . . “We
are all in the thin air business” (p. ix).
Capra’s consciousness perspective has been further elaborated by others. Wilber
(1996), for example, makes the crucial point that a worldview is not a perspective on
a single, pre-given world. Instead, each worldview constructs the “known” world –
the world of each different worldview looks different because it is different. Different
worldviews enact different worlds – not the same world seen differently. Multiple
worlds are seen from differing worldviews. Wilber suggests this is the fullest meaning
of “cultures.” Leonard (1972) too points out the difficulty of explaining the future
in the language of today that is faced by social observers as they attempt to articulate
their vision of an emergent alternative way of organising society (see, e.g., Fuller 1963,
1969; Kahn and Wiener 1969; Thompson 1971, 1989; Bell 1973; Boulding 1978;
Roszak 1978; Henderson 1978; McLuhan and Powers 1989; Goldsmith, 1992).
Goldsmith (1992) expresses this well: “ ... there is no rational discourse between
the proponents of different paradigms. They speak different languages, see things in a
fundamentally different way and therefore cannot really communicate” (p. 92).
Nor is the question of consciousness just a struggle for ideas. The “culture shift”
is manifest not only in the less material economy, but in the rise and convergence of
social movements. These movements (e.g., ecology and feminism) progress towards,
and come together for, a profound cultural transformation bringing about changes in
social and political structures that overcome the limits of the Cartesian world view
and its associated reality distortions whereby reality is constructed on the physics
model as comprising only empirically observable matter, even when it is almost two
decades since scientific summaries declared that, from the standpoint of physics, this
Matter Myth (Davies and Gribbin 1992) is scientifically outmoded. Capra (1983)
identified similar components in the decline and fall of cultures and theorised
transition points:
In the regular pattern of rise, culmination, decline, and disintegration, which seems
to be characteristic of cultural evolution, the decline occurs when a culture has
become too rigid – in its technologies, ideas, or social organization – to the meet the
challenge of changing conditions .... During the process of decline and disintegration
5. Varey and McKie Staging consciousness: marketing 3.0, post-consumerism and future pathways 325
the dominant social institutions are still imposing their outdated views but are gradually
disintegrating, while new creative minorities face the new challenges with ingenuity and
rising confidence.
(pp. 465-466)
Both historian Arnold Toynbee (1972), and culture scholar Raymond Williams (1965,
1977), could discern a pattern in the evolution of culture, in which, at any point in
time, the then dominant worldview sits alongside both a residual outmoded view
and an emergent alternative view. In the early 21st century, the currently-dominant
paradigm puts forward belief in the scientific method as the only valid way to
knowledge. It is wedded to a vision of the universe as a mechanical system composed
of elementary material building blocks, a view of life in society as a competitive
struggle for existence, and faith in unlimited material progress through economic and
technological growth (Capra 1983).
The values shift in Capra’s work, which is increasingly being taken up, entails the
decline of sensate culture, the decline of patriarchy (from authority and representation
to participation), and the decline of fossil fuel dependency. It also involves an
evolutionary step, or “great transition,” or “transformation,” out of patterns of
unhealthy and wasteful production and consumption (Capra 1983, p. 445) and
resource-consuming life styles (p. 452) (Leonard 1972; Gallopin and Raskin 2002;
Raskin et al. 2002; Raskin et al. 2010). This idea of societal evolution towards more
complex social organisation has significant cultural turning points between phases,
and “between-epoch” transitions as unsettled social organisation (Toynbee 1976).
Toynbee’s equivalent turning-point is in the history of the biosphere. Mankind is
the first living species to acquire, in pursuing mastery (material power) over the
biosphere (nature), the power to wreck the habitat, and thus to make itself extinct.
Goldsmith (1992) sees this as provoking a “cultural mega-mutation, and ecologically-
based revitalization movement” (p. 220).
This is not a linear progression of worldviews and complicates the clear cut nature
of periodic change in Kotler et al. (2010). Rather, the character of the movement from
one social form to another has been, since the mid 20th Century, emergence from the
industrialisation that began in the 16th century, through globalisation, to planetisation
(Thompson 1989). The changes involve considerable interpenetration of ideas and
behaviours that are better seen as a shifting intersection of three simultaneous aspects:
the dominant, the residual, and the emergent (Williams 1977). So, for example, the
residual, which in the 1960s looked on its way out, returned to emergent status later
in the century with the rise of Islam and the growth of fundamentalist movements
in most major faiths. Previous entities are not eliminated, but reconstituted in a new
integration, or set of interlocking tensions, which bear the imprints of the past and in
which the future is an aspect of the present (Leonard 1972).
BOOK TWO: FROM TURNING POINT TO THIRD WAVE
As Capra was assembling his “cultural system” turning point logic in conversation with
a multi-disciplinary and extra-disciplinary range of advisors, others were engaged in
aligned activities. Toffler was crafting his best-seller-to-be on the new civilisation.
What he termed the third revolution followed the earlier agricultural and industrial
upheavals in social, economic and political structures, which also brought forth new
attitudes, life-styles, and roles. In Future Shock (Toffler 1971), he recognised the
seminal social effects of the “superindustrial,” and continued in The Third Wave
6. 326 JCB Journal of Customer Behaviour, Volume 9
(1980), our second key book in examining stages of consciousness, to outline the
global effects of the transformation.
What Toffler could see in his “large-scale synthesis” was that new methods of
production led to the healing of the producer versus consumer cleavage in the
citizenry, bringing with it the prospect of a future of truly humane social organisation.
Since the industrial revolution, an invisible wedge between production for self-use
and production for exchange-in-commerce had become the commonplace experience
of citizens. This served as the basis for the principles of marketing. Yet, in pre-
industrial times, the latter was a tiny part of all work done – only a tiny fraction, or
perhaps faction, of the population was market-dependent. So the now commonplace
“pecuniary transactions” were fringe experiences. Industrialism almost eradicated
self-sufficiency as the “natural economy” became a “marketised profit economy,”
which switched the purpose of most product-of-labour, and labour itself, from use
to exchange. The dominant mode of production became produce for others as the
means to profit through exchange and organised marketing served to bridge the
gap. The notion of “market” is that of an exchange network, although this is not
inherently profit/private property based, since this is only one form of market. The
market reconnects producer and consumer – only the capitalist form is profit-based/
money-based. Markets have been, are, and can also be, for example, barter-based.
Toffler identified the gap in the industrial mindset. As producer, the citizen is
called to comply with rules such as deferred gratification, discipline, control, restraint,
obedience, and team play. But as consumer the game is instant gratification. Because
hedonism is not calculation, discipline can be abandoned in pursuit of individualistic
pleasure. An economy tends towards schizophrenia as a result of industrialism’s
obsessive concern with money, goods, things, and commercial self-interest, as well
as the inevitable market dependence with its inherent standardisation, specialisation,
synchronisation, and centralisation. The notion of the “market intensity” of a society
indicates the time spent buying, selling, exchanging goods and services, and in labour
to earn “spending power.” By the 1970s, one of the hallmarks of so-called advanced
civilisations was consumerism, with the accompanying warfare, competition, endless
expansion, and lifelong grabbing for material accumulation (Leonard 1972).
Strikingly, Toffler’s meta-review saw that we could also already, even by the 1970s
and 1980s, see the rise, or return, of the “prosumer” (producer-consumer) who
predominantly produces for his or her own use rather than for exchange. Whereas
the industrial revolution shifted most economic activity out of prosumption into
apparently open (“free”) markets, this movement brought with it the re-emergence
of production for self rather than for the market, along with new assumptions
about nature, progress, evolution, time, space, matter, causation. Echoing Capra’s
findings, Toffler observed that the long-standing dominance of the machine analogy
was being substituted with process, feedback, and disequilibrium. Moreover, in the
market economy, customised goods made in holistic continuous-flow processes were
increasingly controlled directly by the consumer. In preference to buying goods and
services from others, the prosumers prefer to produce for themselves, and they may
choose to seek support from others in the process.
The Third Wave civilisation resembles sustainable society in embryonic form.
It features decentralised production, appropriate scale, renewable energy, de-
urbanisation, work in the home, and high levels of prosumption. Following Hegel’s
notion of thesis-anti-thesis-synthesis, in simultaneously overcoming and preserving,
Toffler saw this as a dialectical return. It resembled the (pre-industrial) First Wave,
in that society might attain a high material standard of living without focusing all
7. Varey and McKie Staging consciousness: marketing 3.0, post-consumerism and future pathways 327
energies on producing for exchange (materialism). In the combination of a vastly
reduced market sector, a different ethic (i.e., from passive consumer to active self-
help prosumer) will dominate. In addition, the rise of the computer network enables
dis-intermediation with impersonal, and sometimes distant, specialists, experts, and
professionals, because producers are not needed. This reverses the sprawl of the
market into the life sphere.
Toffler himself could envisage the end of marketisation and a rebalancing of the
“visible” and “invisible” sectors of the economy (de-marketisation). These would
reverse the internalisation of labour costs within firms. Firms then, as the consumer
replaces the producer to become a prosumer, become enablers/supporters/partners,
rather than producers, in co-creative acts (see also Zuboff and Maxmin 2002, on
“distributed capitalism” and “individuated consumption”). Prosumption has become
increasingly prominent since the mid 20th century, yet prosumers have always been
evident. However, it made sense to emphasise first the producer in the Industrial
Revolution, and then the consumer in post-world-war society (Ritzer 2009). In
systems, the apparent character comes from the emphasis of the time, and the
development of social theory was producerist before it became consumerist in its
bias. Indeed, this very switch in attention is an early indication of a shift in culture
(sometimes debated in terms of late modern, or postmodern, feature).
The market is a psychosocial structure – a way of organising, an ethos, a shared set
of expectations, and, in marketised society, life is understood, and accepted by many,
as a succession of contractual transactions. The industrial revolution not only brought
forth great strides in mechanical extensions of our affordances (see McLuhan 1964),
it also involved an era of market expansion (broader, further, bigger, and faster). At
present, as the marketisation of the world nears completion by incorporating more
of the vast Bottom of Pyramid populations, society now needs to maintain, renovate,
and update (Cunningham 2008). This conversion to a trans-market civilisation (the
Third Wave) is the essence of Toffler’s vision. This civilisation is dependent on the
established exchange network, with a new agenda beyond market-building. Part of it is
a re-visioning of the role of the market in our lives so that commerce markets become
less important, and society tends towards demarketisation and demassification.
The key major absence in both Kotler et al. and Toffler is democratisation and re-
distribution on a global scale. Kotler et al. (2010), for example, hail the expansion
of the market in Bottom of the Pyramid regions as an unambiguous success without
questioning the human costs or the need for an egalitarian dimension. Wilkinson and
Pickett’s (2009) research findings in this area are summed up in their book title The
Spirit Level: Why Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better. If consumers do not have
enough dollars in their wallets to be worth targeting for sales, what then happens to
the human spirit of those impoverished, although numerically significant (especially
in regions of Africa and Asia), populations?
BOOK THREE: RIDING THE CLUETRAIN AND RETURNING TO
MARKETING 3.0
There are democratic tendencies – although still more focussed on the developed
world in terms of the haves, and not the have-nots in the digital divide – and a kindred
shift away from conventional markets in our third key book. The idea so clearly
expressed in The Cluetrain Manifesto (Levine, Locke, Searls and Weinberger 2000)
8. 328 JCB Journal of Customer Behaviour, Volume 9
is that business is fundamentally human, and natural conversation among ordinary
people is the true language of commerce, and the Internet can remove unnecessary
marketing middlepeople. For Levine et al. (2000), one dynamo of this change is
that corporations work best when the people on the inside have the fullest contact
possible with the people on the outside. They argue that corporations lost the human
voice for a while, and now these ancient, timeless, and true principles are resurfacing
in business. The triggering event is the advent of a global communication system that
puts everyone in touch with everyone. Indeed, the book itself was the product of
an extended conversation, which, literally, was conducted electronically among four
Internet dwellers. While it was initially presented as content on a web site, it was then
published in paper-based print, which was, subsequently, posted online. The text has
been adopted by many as a user’s guide to the online economy because it describes
business as it really is and as it is really becoming.
The reality of the networked marketplace is a culture of participation in the “great
conversation.” The Internet connects people to each other and provides a space for
hearing the human voice. The online marketplace is not necessarily a market at all.
To its inhabitants, it is primarily a place in which all participants are audience to
each other as market conversations interact with the conversations of the corporate
workforce and others just socialising. This convergence promises a vibrant renewal
in which commercial markets become far more naturally integrated into the life of
individuals and communities, or even become unnecessary. Levine et al. (2000) make
it clear that companies need consumers more than consumers need companies and
that while “Companies can now communicate with their markets directly. If they
blow it, it could be their last chance . . . . [and that they] need to realize their markets
are often laughing. At them.” (p. xiii)
Interestingly, although The Cluetrain Manifesto prefigures much in Kotler et al.’s
(2010) “Collaborative Social Media” (p. 9), the later book does not cite the earlier
one. At this point we want to suggest some reasons why, and also some reasons why
it, and the Capra and Toffler books, do not fit with marketing 3.0. Indeed, we will
argue that all three of our selected books are symptomatic of many others that both
augment the marketing 3.0 conceptualisation and question its limitations (see Sheth
and Sisodia 2006, for example).
Levine et al. (2000), for example, challenge Kotler et al. (2010) in the serious
playfulness of their levity. What The Cluetrain Manifesto says of Companies – that
they “need to lighten up and take themselves less seriously. . . . [and] get a sense of
humor” (Levine et al. 2000, p.xiii) applies equally to Kotler et al. (2010). A sense
of humour would assist in a sense of perspective. At the moment, such grandiose
and seemingly altruistic statements as “Marketing will need to evolve to a third stage
where it addresses the spirit of the consumers” (Kotler et. al. 2010, p. 35) co-exist with
the mundane functionalism and economic self-interest of claims that the economic
downturn means customers “may want to save more for another day. . . . [which]
means that marketers will have to work harder than ever to separate consumers from
their dollars” (p. 29). This is not to assert that this is pure hypocrisy – particularly
since Kotler et al. (2010) clearly leave functionalism in Marketing 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0.
Nevertheless, it is an unacknowledged contradiction. As a result, statements that the
“point is not to overlook the spirit” (p. 35) could mean that not overlooking the spirit
is more concerned with not reducing profitability then supporting a revolution in
consciousness.
This is confirmed by the absence of significant literature on consciousness. Capra’s
account of expanded consciousness has been further developed by Wilber (1977;
9. Varey and McKie Staging consciousness: marketing 3.0, post-consumerism and future pathways 329
1997; 2001) and many others (e.g., Fuller 1963, 1969; Leonard 1972; Thompson
1971, 1990; Roszak 1978; Satin 1978; Henderson 1981; Ferguson 1982). However
marketing 3.0 only extends the field (from Kotler’s 1967 textbook synthesis of
ideas from economics, behavioural science, organisational science and mathematics)
towards anthropology and sociology, rather than spirituality, despite the prominence
of the notion of human spirit in the text and in the subtitle.
BACK TO BASE: A NEGLECTED WAY FORWARD FOR MARKETING
Marketing 3.0 also neglects relevant movements within marketing, in particular
Service-Dominant (S-D) Logic. This potentially transcendent perspective on marketing
emerged at the end of the 20th century. It took several years to navigate through
academic peer review before culminating in publication among the “conventional
‘wisdom’” of marketing, and a subsequent outpouring of critique, application, and
extension. Vargo and Lusch, the originating authors, skilfully brought together
several previously disparate marketing concepts, ideas, and perspectives in a way
that is challenging the presumptions of mainstream theory and practice (see Vargo
and Lusch 2004, 2006). Service Dominant Logic is a holistic movement beyond the
pre-occupation with matter, energy, and profitability. Orthodox marketing focuses
almost entirely on goods as the value-embedded unit of exchange, and non-material
services are weakly treated as “non-goods.”
In this still uncommon sense, service is the appropriate logic for marketing
(Ballantyne and Varey 2008). For Vargo and Lusch (2004) service is an interactive
process of “doing something for someone” that is valued. More radically, goods take
the role of rendering service and are valued in use. In this context, service becomes
the unifying purpose of any business relationship. This marketing worldview involves
broadening and reframing what, by convention, counts as service. In so doing, S-D
Logic stands in opposition to 200 years of mainstream economic logic in explaining
productive capacity. Vargo and Lusch have succeeded in applying their scholarly
thinking to old themes with synergistic results. Their thesis challenges marketing
orthodoxy, and will support much future innovation in both theoretical and practical
terms.
Although their growing body of work refers to neither Capra nor Toffler, Vargo
and Lusch’s perspectives not only align well with them, but could be enriched by
them. Nevertheless, in drawing on a historical review of economic thinking, Vargo
and Lusch position the service-dominant logic as a fundamental, and congruent, shift
of worldview. Their S-D Logic is a mindset for a unified understanding of the purpose
and nature of firms, markets, and society. The change in perspective places goods as
a special case within the general context of service-exchanged-for-service and shifts
the view from the manufacturer to that of the producer-consumer nexus (i.e. the
co-production of value for and by people with skills, knowledge, and experience
interacting purposefully to creatively integrate resources). In the S-D Logic worldview,
instead of service marketing “breaking free” from goods marketing, all of marketing
breaks free from the goods and manufacturing – and deeply-material – mindset. In
essence marketing becomes not the “taking to market” of manufactured goods, but
contribution to value co-creating activity.
As a consequence, value-in-exchange, product management, and communication
management become much less significant than interaction management. Moreover,
partners are understood as not tied – unrealistically – to a producer-consumer
10. 330 JCB Journal of Customer Behaviour, Volume 9
distinction. Material goods are service appliances, means not ends, and the focus
shifts to the total consumption process, including value-in-use and beyond. People
can be customers or self-servers – the marketplace may be unnecessary and some
exchange will not involve the corporate-as-producer at all, or only marginally, as a
facilitator. Corporate marketing will take on a more humanistic relational character,
derived from a social/societal mindset rather than the manufacturing economics of
the 19th century. That offers a more credible post-consumerism, where people opt to
take the role of consumers when they feel it appropriate, or necessary, and not when
pushed or pulled by functional marketing. In this way the consumer is neither dead,
nor obsolete, but becomes more of an appropriate option for more and more people
at different times.
UPGRADES AND OPERATING SYSTEMS
So what of Marketing 3.0? This seems little more than an upgrade proposition,
whilst many are still struggling with Marketing 1.0, or Marketing 1.0+, and others
are trying to install Marketing 2.0. Perhaps, in taking a longer-term view, we can
recognise the Marketing 2.21 Beta revision that has developed in the face of user
feedback. Meanwhile, there is mounting demand for an alternative operating system
for the person-society-nature relationship: Kotler et al. (2010) advocate integrating
aspects of the open-source movement into a kind of open-source marketing, which is
already evident in the explosive growth in adopting social media.
More radically, Varey (2010a) has proposed Welfare Marketing as:
an extension of the [Quality-of-Life] conception of marketing that requires an alternate
set of ‘postindustrial’ values, recognizing that the generation of wealth through
profitable growth is only one contribution to QoL, health, and happiness. Marketing’s
primary contribution to society is thus the proactive and essential creation of valued
benefits that does not create unsustainable costs and harmful consequences.
(p. 121).
Welfare marketing would help green consumption by ensuring that goods and services
produced do none of the following: endanger health; damage the environment in
production, use, or disposal; create unnecessary waste; destroy endangered species
and environments; or injure or exploit third parties (including wildlife). Such a
commitment would severely tax the judgment faculty of policy makers and decision
makers. It would make judgment far more significant in marketing competence
(Varey 2010b), and draw on advances in economics (Akerlof and Shiller 2009) and
leadership (Tichy and Bennis 2007), and the sociology and psychology of happiness,
political science, and ecology (e.g., Svendsen and Svendsen 2009; Capra and Pauli
1995), as well as epidemiology-influenced studies of equality as in Wilkinson and
Pickett’s (2009) research findings that future human fulfillment “lies in improving
the quality of social environment in our societies” (p. 265) with “a historic shift in
the sources of human satisfaction from economic growth to a more sociable society”
(p. 226).
However it does it, the discipline of marketing needs to commit to a higher purpose
beyond the Promethean enterprise of modern society, or, to adapt Porritt’s (2006)
Capitalism As If The World Matters, marketing as if social development mattered.
At the same time, the field has to recognise presumptions and assumptions about
citizens as consumers and about markets, choice, well-being, and so on. This requires
11. Varey and McKie Staging consciousness: marketing 3.0, post-consumerism and future pathways 331
applying moral, or normative, constraints on the market and abandoning amoral
conceptions of productivity/efficiency as good in themselves (Kassiola 1990); and,
the general adoption of the precautionary principle in policy and practice (O’Riordan
and Cameron 1994; Raffensperger and Tickner 1999). It also means taking the view
that if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public or
to the environment, the burden of proof, in the absence of a scientific consensus
that harm would not ensue, falls on those who would advocate taking the action.
Only then should the focus move to matters of practice, scope of application, and
efficiency. The social process of marketing can contribute to transformative social
change. Learning ‘‘our way out together’’ (Milbrath 1989) from corrosive aspects
of the dominant social paradigm (Kilbourne, McDonagh and Prothero 1997) is a
matter of appropriateness and of expression of ideas and values. It will involve a
democratised and holistic form of marketing that is more deeply infused with spirited
altruism rather than self-interested targeting of consumer wallets. It will also create
the scope to journey beyond marketing 3.0 and, informed by a wider range of
disciplines than anthropology and sociology, to discover a more post-consumerist
and planet-friendly way of being in the world.
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ABOUT THE AUTHORS AND CORRESPONDENCE
Richard Varey is Professor of Marketing, and a specialist in inquiring on the future
of marketing, human interaction in commercial situations, and “marketing for
sustainable prosperous society”. He is Associate Editor (Asia-Pacific) for the Journal
of Customer Behaviour, and a former editor of the Australasian Marketing Journal.
He is a member of a range editorial boards, including Marketing Theory, the European
Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Communication Management, the Journal of
Marketing Communications, the Australasian Marketing Journal, the Corporate
Reputation Review, and the Journal of Business Ethics (sustainability panel). He is a
graduate of the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, UK (BSc 1980) and Manchester
School of Management, UMIST, UK (MSc 1990, PhD 1996). He has written books
on internal marketing, relationship marketing, and marketing communication.
Corresponding author: Dr Richard J. Varey, Professor of Marketing, Department
of Marketing, The Waikato Management School, University of Waikato, Private
Bag 3105, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand
T +64 7 838 4617
F +64 7 838 4352
E rvarey@waikato.ac.nz
David McKie is Professor of Management Communication at The Waikato Management
School in Hamilton, New Zealand. He has authored or coauthored more than 50
articles, 22 book chapters, and 4 books. His latest book (co-written with Associate
Professor Vikram Murthy) on 21st-century leadership was published in 2009, and
he also co-wrote (with Associate Professor Debashish Munshi) Reconfiguring Public
14. 334 JCB Journal of Customer Behaviour, Volume 9
Relations: Ecology, Equity, and Enterprise, which won the 2007 NCA PRIDE award.
As CEO of RAM (Results by Action Management) International Consulting, he
also works as a change, leadership, and strategic communication consultant. He
has run leadership development programs as well as workshops for individuals
and organizations in the private and public sectors in China, Europe, Korea, India,
the Middle East, and the United States. He currently has one book proposal under
review and is co-writing two more books: one on action research and another on
complexity.
Dr David McKie, Professor of Management Communication, Department of
Management Communication, The Waikato Management School, University of
Waikato, Private Bag 3105, Hamilton 3240, New Zealand
T +64 7 838 4917
F +64 7 838 4358
E dmckie@mngt.waikato.ac.nz
![322 JCB Journal of Customer Behaviour, Volume 9
intangible consumer, or does the field itself need to transform? Our journey explores
what lies beyond the traditional customer, or more specifically, consumer, whom
we have tentatively conceptualised as the “post-consumer.” En route, we selectively
examine pathways taken, and pathways not taken, with a view to informing options
facing contemporary marketing.
In odd ways, this specific 21st century quest resembles the medieval Ultima Thule
as a place beyond the borders of the known world – a place from which there is no
return, only further journey into the transformation (Leonard 1972). Before that
quest, however, we benchmark using two recent books involving of one of marketing’s
most influential figures, Philip Kotler, who has undertaken a similar mapping of
pathways to the present and routes to the future. The first of Kotler’s contributions
focuses more on the instability of the present. Indeed, Kotler and Caslione’s (2009)
Chaotics: The Business of Managing and Marketing in the Age of Turbulence goes so
far as to coin the term “chaotics” to convey how the innovative and disordered nature
of the age interweaves with business as a whole: “Turbulence is the new normality,
punctuated by periodic and intermittent spurts of prosperity and downturn – including
extended downturns amounting to recession or even depression” [italics in original] (p.
xii). The second of his contributions, Kotler, Kartajaya, and Setiawan’s (2010) book
entitled Marketing 3.0: From Products to Customers to the Human Spirit, implies an
utterly intangible destination. In effect, their subtitle’s reference to the Human Spirit
dematerialises the post-customer, or post-consumer, in a way that signals the possible
disappearance of the embodied consumer. So how did the author of the seminal
Marketing Management (Kotler, 1st Edition published 1967, 13th Edition published
2008, with a China adaptation in 2008, and a Europe adaptation in 2009) arrive at
such a conclusion?
Kotler et al.’s (2010) recent intervention conceptualises the present as Marketing
3.0 and offers a table (p. 6), which sets out its distinctions from the two preceding
historical stages. The other two stages are categorised as Marketing 1.0 and Marketing
2.0, and all three are distinguished along the following lines:
Marketing 1.0 is founded on products and called ‘Product-centric Marketing’, Marketing
2.0 is founded on customers and called ‘Consumer-oriented Marketing’, and Marketing
3.0 is founded on the human spirit and called “Values-driven Marketing”. Each stage has
different objectives, enabling forces, and value propositions so that 1.0’s aim is to ‘Sell
products’ and is enabled by the ‘Industrial Revolution’ to be ‘Functional’ in value; 2.0’s
aim is to ‘Satisfy and retain the consumers’ and is enabled by ‘Information Technology’ to
be ‘Functional and emotional’ in value; and 3.0’s aim is to ‘Make the world a better place’
and is enabled by ‘New wave technology’ to be ‘Functional, emotional, and spiritual’
(adapted from Kotler et al. 2010, p. 6).
Space prevents a more elaborate description of Kotler et al.’s (2010) justification of
these stages but, like most historical stage arguments, its force is directed towards
influencing the present. Bearing this in mind, and in order to have points of reference
for our different staging of consciousness, we present the three major factors that they
identify as shaping the crucial third stage of 3.0. Two of their factors are relatively
commonplace across the management and marketing literature: firstly, “new wave
technology [which] becomes the major driver for the birth of Marketing 3.0” (Kotler
et al. 2010, p. 5) and has them characterise the time as “The Age of Participation and
Collaborative Marketing” (p. 5); and secondly, globalisation, which has them also
characterise the time as “The Age of Globalization Paradox and Cultural Marketing”
(p. 12).](data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7)