Enabling and Cultivating Wiser Consumption: The Roles of Marketing and Public Policy

Contemporary consumers, societies, and ecologies face many challenges to well-being. Consumer researchers have responded with new attention to what engenders happiness and flourishing, particularly as a function of wiser consumption. Consumer wisdom has been conceptualized as the pursuit of well-being through the application of six interrelated dimensions: responsibility, purpose, flexibility, perspective, reasoning, and sustainability. However, up to now, the roles of marketing management and government policies with respect to enabling and supporting consumer wisdom have not been thoroughly and systematically considered. To do this, the authors adopt an integrative approach based on a range of theoretical and empirical insights from both consumer research and wisdom research in the social sciences. They weave these insights into the stages of an expanded version of the circular economy model of the value cycle, within which they also include the traditional four Ps of the marketing mix. This approach allows the authors to identify how marketing practices and public policies can enable and support consumer wisdom, resulting in advancements to well-being and the common good, as well as restorations to the missions and reputations of business and government.