Marketing to End War, Create Peace, and Enhance Sustainable Well-Being: Introduction to the Special Issue

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Responsible marketing, policy, and consumer behavior are integral to ending wars, creating peace, and enhancing sustainable well-being. This editorial commentary introduces and provides an overview of a special issue comprising marketing research intended to prevent or ameliorate negative consequences from war and other forms of violent conflict. It features 11 scholarly articles by globally dispersed scholars using a range of methodologies at various levels of analysis. These distinguished researchers were motivated by keen awareness of and deep abhorrence for the deleterious effects of systemic violence, as well as by examples of policies implemented and products and services that have brought relief to the devastated and dispossessed. This compendium makes clear that marketing scholarship and practice can be effective in advancing well-being for populations suffering from systemic violence and related destruction, deprivation, and uncertainty. The scholarship is timely and compelling, as war and other forms of violent social conflict continue to inflict great harm on people, societies, countries, and our planet; it makes tangible a shared belief that constructive engagement via coordinated policy and marketing innovations can help end and mitigate conflict, and is vital to creating and sustaining peace and prosperity.