ABSTRACT
Marketers are trained to help consumers solve their problems, from mundane decisions such as what to eat for dinner to complex matters such as how to care for an aging parent. In return for this help, individuals willingly “give back” to the marketing organization by, for example, buying their products and services, remaining loyal to these products and services, and promoting them via word of mouth. While this exchange process is—or at least, should be—at the heart of marketing as a philosophy, a discipline, and an organizational function, we increasingly hear of this exchange as imbalanced, favoring business, and hurting both people and planet.
In its focus on a balanced exchange between parties—business, individuals, and society— positive marketing offers a promising program for reshaping the way in which companies and consumers interact and benefit from one another. This chapter reviews the theory and practice of positive marketing, the role of virtue ethics and positive psychology in influencing adherence to positive marketing principles, and the impact of positive marketing on happiness and life satisfaction.
The first section examines the origins of marketing and its relationship to positive marketing. Drawing on a historical perspective, we explain how and why marketing has gotten so far afield from the principles that constitute it and the effects that this has on consumers and on marketers themselves.
The second section examines what it will take to get marketing back on track both as a discipline and as a function. Specifically, this section addresses how marketers are trained, new metrics that are available to marketers for defining success, and the role of research and the responsibility of researchers in keeping business on a positive marketing track.
Drawing on virtue ethics and positive psychology, the third section provides directions for further research in positive marketing and guidelines designed to help marketers adhere to positive marketing principles.
The fourth section explains how following positive marketing guidelines can generate greater life satisfaction and happiness—both hedonic and eudaimonic—for consumers and marketers, and benefits for society and the world at large.
