Mental illness and marketing: A 50-year scoping review and future research framework

Marketing scholars wield untapped potential to expand research into the wellbeing of consumers with mental illness beyond existing clinical and medical perspectives, enriching the field with unique insights into consumer behavior, market dynamics, and strategic interventions. This scoping review maps over 50 years of research at the intersection of mental illness and marketing in business disciplines. We examine a corpus of 1064 peer-reviewed journal articles using the population, concept, and context framework to integrate extant knowledge and identify research gaps. We present a comprehensive future-facing research framework that highlights gaps at the consumer, market, policy, and society levels that marketing researchers are particularly qualified to investigate. Through a series of illustrative research directives, we highlight areas of opportunities for better understanding and addressing the interdependencies that exist within this complex and multidisciplinary domain.