Editorial: Social marketing futures

Abstract

Social marketing futuresHow will social marketers shape the world, our communities and our profession towards 2025?What avenues offer immense opportunities for success and accelerate real transformation yet are largely untapped?Looking to tomorrow, where are the openings for groundbreaking partnerships?How can we be pioneers, innovators, leading cutting-edge change makers?What skills and knowledge do we need for the 21st century yet to come?How do we open our field to new scholars?The answers to these questions and many more lie at the frontiers of social marketing theory and practice.Social marketing futures will include, yet are not limited to, understanding the nature and scope of changeregenerative social marketing, ways of accelerating changemutuality-based social marketing and being a change catalystdisruptive social marketing. Regenerative social marketingAs the world moves towards net zero for 2050þ, Planet Earth as a key stakeholder will be a defining principle that sets social marketing apart from other change mechanisms, e.g.education and legislation.Patagonia leads the way with CEO Johnson explaining "there's no business to be done on a dead planet" [1].Without a healthy vibrant world brimming with biodiversity, social marketing will have no role.How will we respond to Earth to be a key stakeholder in social marketing plans, research, interventions and impact outcomes?The principle of Planet Earth as a key social marketing stakeholder, comparable to funders, policy makes and clients, will herald us into collective action.It offers transformative change in "the patterns of daily life in human communities directly impacting the provisioning systems that form in a community to meet the needs and wants of individuals, groups, and entities for goods, services, experiences, ideas" (Layton and Domegan, 2021, p. 4).Social marketers will broaden their theories, beyond an intervention targeting an audience or a community, to understand provisioning and system concepts such as complex causation, non-linear feedbacks; self-organisation, multi-level networks and more that emerge over time.We will delineate top-down and bottom-up evolving processes characterised by constructs such as communities, networks, communication and cooperation.What, when and how does this hold true for social marketing?Why so?How will social marketers respond to the urgent need for collective action and transformative change?As well as Planet Earth, technology is a defining force in any provisioning system in any civilisation, whether it is a public, commercial, collaborative or an informal system.Twentyfirst century technologies such as quantum and edge computing, genomics, robotics, smart devices, datafication and AI will dominate our provisioning systems [2].What good and what harm will technologies such as smart devices and AI bring to human behaviours?How will these technologies affect what humans value and do not value?What do these technologies mean to social marketing theory and practice?What skills will we need?Beyond high technologies, low-tech contemporary solutions offer as much, indeed, Julia Watson argues more, for resilient change that collectively benefits Planet Earth and communities [3].Award-winning Sponge cities are an example that combine high and low technology-based behaviour, social and systems change, to address climate change accelerated urban flooding [4].How will we choose to work in harmony "with" nature?How do we learn from natures' behaviours to design and create contemporary nature-based solutions that will improve our daily lives, and in many cases, save our communities?How will social marketing use high and low technologies in a symbiotic and holistic way to accelerate