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Sustainable marketing, equity, and economic growth: a resource-advantage, economic freedom approach

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Abstract

Sustainable marketing may be viewed as marketing that is within, and supportive of, sustainable economic development. Peattie (The Marketing Review 2(2):129–146, 2001) maintains that sustainable economic development poses major challenges for marketing. These challenges concern futurity, equity, and needs/wants. This article focuses on the equity and needs/wants challenges of sustainable development and argues that public policies and programs (of wealthy nations, poor countries, or bodies such as the United Nations) can improve economic equity by promoting the economic growth of poor countries. Furthermore, it argues that a major reason why past efforts to promote the economic growth of poor countries have so often failed is that such (allegedly) pro-growth policies have been guided by an impoverished theory of economic growth. Specifically, this article (1) discusses the implications of sustainable development for marketing, (2) shows seven ways that sustainable marketing and resource-advantage (R-A) theory intersect, (3) argues that the cause of sustainable marketing is furthered by promoting economic growth, (4) identifies the two major, radically different, theories of economic growth: neoclassical, static-equilibrium growth theory and dynamic competition growth theory, (5) shows how the two theories make four radically different, testable predictions, and (6) reviews the empirical evidence concerning the four predictions. The article concludes that the equity and needs/wants challenges of sustainable development and the cause of sustainable development more generally can be addressed by poor nations pursuing economic growth, which in turn implies that public policy should focus not on increasing investment, but on institutions that favor economic freedom and dynamic competition.

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Notes

  1. This article’s analysis of economic growth draws heavily on Hunt (1997b, c, d, 1998, 2000b, 2007) and Hunt and Arnett (2001, 2003). Readers are encouraged to review these sources for more detailed analyses of some of the issues discussed in this article.

  2. These articles include only a small sample of the articles that either develop the theory or use it as a basis for theoretical or empirical analyses. See Hunt and Morgan (2005) for more.

  3. Given that both the resource-based view (RBV) and R-A theory see firms as combiners of heterogeneous, imperfectly mobile resources, what are the differences between RBV and R-A theory? The differences are numerous. For example, works on RBV generally (1) view RBV as exclusively a theory of the firm, (2) view innovation as exogenous to the firm, (3) view competition among firms to be equilibrating, (4) view demand as outside their theory, (5) confound marketplace positions of competitive advantage with the comparative advantages in resources that lead to the positions of competitive advantage, (6) view the firm as seeking “economic rents” (and, by implication, view firms’ behavior as undesirable for society), and (7) are silent with respect to the public policy implications of RBV.

    In contrast, R-A theory (1) is a theory of competition that includes a theory of the firm, (2) views innovation as endogenous to the process of firms’ competing, (3) views competition among firms to be evolutionary and disequilibrating, (4) incorporates a theory of demand, (5) clearly distinguishes marketplace positions of competitive advantage from the comparative advantages in resources that lead to the positional advantages, (6) views the firm as seeking superior financial performance (and shows how this pursuit is highly beneficial to society), and (7) maintains that the theory has public policy implications and, indeed, has developed such implications in Hunt (2000b, 2007), Hunt and Arnett (2001), and Grengs (2006).

  4. Most resource-based theorists focus on inimitable resources. This may be because most resource-based theorists still rely on the neoclassical tradition in economics, in which innovation is exogenous to competition. The idea of “nonsurpassable resources” is uniquely associated with R-A theory.

  5. The label “R-A theory” was adopted in Hunt (1995) because we discovered that readers found “comparative advantage theory” to be confusing.

  6. See Hunt (1997b) for how R-A theory provides a theoretical foundation “new growth theory,” in general, and endogenous growth models, in particular.

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  1. Department of Marketing, Rawls College of Business, Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, 79409-2101, USA

    Shelby D. Hunt

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  1. Shelby D. Hunt
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Correspondence to Shelby D. Hunt.

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Hunt, S.D. Sustainable marketing, equity, and economic growth: a resource-advantage, economic freedom approach. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 39, 7–20 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-010-0196-3

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