ABSTRACT
This chapter explores both the endogenous and exogenous appropriateness, challenges, and benefits of employing strategic foresight and futures thinking as an overall practice in marketing research and, more broadly, marketing as a discipline and the marketing communications industry.
This is in accordance with foresight’s seven usability dimensions, namely 1. learning focused; 2. continuous, adaptive, and narrative-based; 3. challenges a used future; 4. offers alternative futures; 5. inclusive and cognitively diverse; 6. supported by worldview and underlying narrative or metaphor; and 7. a vision, neither too far nor too near, and one that enables and ennobles.
The author draws from his experience in the above mentioned fields to allow for a more pragmatic and nuanced appreciation of foresight in marketing practice.
