Situating Macromarketing Research in an Interconnected World: the Quest for Relationality

564 _____________________________________________________________________________ Situating Macromarketing Research in an Interconnected World: the Quest for Relationality Andrea Lucarelli, Stockholm Business School, Sweden Massimo Giovanardi, University of Leicester, UK Given its emphasis on understanding marketing systems through their reciprocal interactions with society, the task of developing a methodology that captures such complexity is particularly crucial for macromarketing. The aim of the present contribution is to elaborate a methodological approach that is able to operationalize macromarketing complexity into more comprehensive and analyzable forms, which can thus be approached more systematically and, in turn, more critically and effectively. Relationality is identified a relevant approach for contextualizing this endeavor and resonates with the pioneering work of Charles Slater aimed to encourage interdisciplinarity and acknowledge reciprocal relationships between a marketing system and its environment (Nason and White 1981). Relational thinking implies a reality whereby its constituents define and shape each other (see Law 1999). In other words, relationality highlights the importance of interactions through which entities emerge out of the environment’s constituent parts and come into being. The paper first identifies and reviews three types of relational perspectives that have been identified within social sciences in general and marketing in particular (see Hill et al., 2014), namely (i) the “mobilities paradigm”, (ii) “non-representational theories” and (iii) assemblage theories, particularly ANT. The paper then assesses their methodological implications for the analysis of macromarketing, by elaborating an in-depth critical evaluation of commonalities and differences among their main tenets. The suggestion of an ecological approach to macromarketing condenses the fruitful insights of the three perspectives in a sound methodological proposal that renders the complex, processual and dynamic nature of macromarketing phenomena in their true relationships within their environment(s). Concrete suggestions for the implementation of such an approach are identified, with due recognition to the mobile, more-than-human and more-than-representational characteristics of both marketers’ and consumers’ activities.