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Research in marketing strategy

• Review Paper
• Published: 18 August 2018
• Volume 47 , pages 4–29, ( 2019 )

Cite this article

• Neil A. Morgan 1 ,
• Kimberly A. Whitler 2 ,
• Hui Feng 3 &
• Simos Chari 4  

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Marketing strategy is a construct that lies at the conceptual heart of the field of strategic marketing and is central to the practice of marketing. It is also the area within which many of the most pressing current challenges identified by marketers and CMOs arise. We develop a new conceptualization of the domain and sub-domains of marketing strategy and use this lens to assess the current state of marketing strategy research by examining the papers in the six most influential marketing journals over the period 1999 through 2017. We uncover important challenges to marketing strategy research—not least the increasingly limited number and focus of studies, and the declining use of both theory and primary research designs. However, we also uncover numerous opportunities for developing important and highly relevant new marketing strategy knowledge—the number and importance of unanswered marketing strategy questions and opportunities to impact practice has arguably never been greater. To guide such research, we develop a new research agenda that provides opportunities for researchers to develop new theory, establish clear relevance, and contribute to improving practice.

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We follow Varadarjan’s (2010) distinction, using “strategic marketing” as the term describing the general field of study and “marketing strategy” as the construct that is central in the field of strategic marketing—just as analogically “strategic management” is a field of study in which “corporate strategy” is a central construct.

Following the strategic management literature (e.g., Mintzberg 1994 ; Pascale 1984 ), marketing strategy has also been viewed from an “emergent” strategy perspective (e.g. Hutt et al. 1988 ; Menon et al. 1999 ). Conceptually this is captured as realized (but not pre-planned) tactics and actions in Figure 1 .

These may be at the product/brand, SBU, or firm level.

These strategic marketing but “non-strategy” coding areas are not mutually exclusive. For example, many papers in this non-strategy category cover both inputs/outputs and environment (e.g., Kumar et al. 2016 ; Lee et al. 2014 ; Palmatier et al. 2013 ; Zhou et al. 2005 ), or specific tactics, input/output, and environment (e.g., Bharadwaj et al. 2011 ; Palmatier et al. 2007 ; Rubera and Kirca 2012 ).

The relative drop in marketing strategy studies published in JM may be a function of the recent growth of interest in the shareholder perspective (Katsikeas et al. 2016 ) and studies linking marketing-related resources and capabilities directly with stock market performance indicators. Such studies typically treat marketing strategy as an unobserved intervening construct.

Since this concerns integrated marketing program design and execution, marketing mix studies contribute to knowledge of strategy implementation–content when all four major marketing program areas are either directly modeled or are controlled for in studies focusing on one or more specific marketing program components.

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Kelley School of Business, Indiana University, 1309 E. Tenth St., Bloomington, IN, 47405-1701, USA

Neil A. Morgan

Darden School of Business, University of Virginia, 100 Darden Boulevard, Charlottesville, VA, 22903, USA

Kimberly A. Whitler

Ivy College of Business, Iowa State University, 3337 Gerdin Business Building, Ames, IA, 50011-1350, USA

Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Booth Street West, Manchester, M15 6PB, UK

Simos Chari

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Morgan, N.A., Whitler, K.A., Feng, H. et al. Research in marketing strategy. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 47 , 4–29 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-018-0598-1

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Received : 14 January 2018

Accepted : 20 July 2018

Published : 18 August 2018

Issue Date : 15 January 2019

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-018-0598-1

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Reimagining marketing strategy: driving the debate on grand challenges

Ko de ruyter.

1 King’s College, London, London, UK

Debbie Isobel Keeling

2 University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

Kirk Plangger

Matteo montecchi, maura l. scott.

3 Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL USA

Darren W. Dahl

4 University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

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A little less conversation….

A little more action, please. There is no record of Elvis Presley's views on responsible marketing, but his 1968 song, “A Little Less Conversation,” could have been written as a reflection on the global marketing community’s current progress in transforming our field. At the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in 2015, the leaders of 193 nations adopted an ambitious set of 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) combatting poverty, inequality, and discrimination. Since then, it has been an imperative for organizations to reimagine their marketing strategy with an eye towards global impact. This is not only a matter of international policy; important shifts in stakeholder views on responsible marketing are also starting to emerge. For example, supply chain partners and end-customers across many industries are increasingly interested in end-of-life cycle initiatives, product-emission rates, product provenance, and transparency of production. These stakeholders are steadily demanding more environmentally-friendly packaging and lower carbon footprints. Further, stakeholders expect human dignity to be respected along this process. Consequently, long-term supply chain strategies are being redefined to acknowledge climate change and human rights issues in strategy formulation and execution.

In turn, marketing scholars have increasingly become concerned with responsible marketing, and although these issues have not always been the focus of our scholarship, it is evident from current work that they are now. There is a growing, rich conversation involving notions of responsibility within marketing in the current scholarship base. The past decade has witnessed an expansion of concepts and empirical evidence regarding the challenges of environmental sustainability, social responsibility, (mental) health and social care, wealth disparities and poverty, nationalism and its impact on global trade, identity loss, and a wide array of unintended consequences of digitization (Hensen et al., 2016 ). As an academic marketing community we are well-placed to lead on relevant change across the social, economic, environmental, and political landscapes; doing so will provide further opportunities for novel contributions to marketing strategy knowledge. Moreover, there is a wider call for societal and political action through purposeful engagement with the world’s grand challenges, thereby inspiring scholars and industry to work together as partners to reimagine the very definition of effective marketing strategy.

Key to successfully transforming marketing strategy is the creation of forward-looking intellectual frameworks, which can serve as springboards for future research that can inform creative and critical scholarship and practice. At this point, marketing scholars are primed to develop sustainable solutions by aligning the interests of principal stakeholders, not just shareholders, and by balancing longer-term and shorter-term benefits. The conversation about reimagining marketing strategy started with a fundamental and paradigmatic shift away from the discipline’s earlier focus on agency and transaction costs. A fruitful lens through which to continue this conversation is the emerging theorizing on stewardship (c.f., Mick et al., 2012 ), which can simultaneously be aligned with sustaining contributions to (or even reimagining) the bottom-line. Furthermore, and in the spirit of stewardship thinking, we recognize that the strength of extant marketing scholarship lies in its knowledge exchange and co-creation with stakeholders. This collaborative approach during the various stages of research design and execution can, and does, bring about meaningful change. It also involves consideration of the interplay between customers/consumers, firms, governmental policies, and society.

We begin by introducing the notion of stewardship as a basis for identifying three complementary principles to guide the continued transformation of marketing strategy (i.e., becoming responsible, respectful, and resilient), which we discuss and integrate with the 17 UN SDGs ( https://sdgs.un.org/goals ). Importantly, we argue that the application of these principles to the grand challenges faced by society today will be an effective way to frame marketing investigations and achieve substantive contributions that meet these challenges. Subsequently, we take stock of the current marketing scholarship through the lens of these three principles by applying them directly to the results of a bibliometric analysis of the marketing literature. We conclude by reflecting on the opportunities for academic practice in marketing with respect to meeting the grand challenges that the world faces.

Responsible, resilient, and respectful principles

Central to stewardship theory is recognizing the importance of balancing personal goals with goals of a larger entity (Hernandez, 2008 ). We feel that stewardship provides a robust basis for reimagining marketing strategy for three reasons. First, if individuals are to assume responsibility to support the greater good, they do so based on the development of an ideological and relational commitment. There is an opportunity for marketing scholars to both identify business practices that can promote collective solutions that benefit both society and the firm, and also quantify benefits to firms and customers of taking a broader collective focus in business practices. This may encourage managers and decision-makers to strive for equilibrium between personal and collective interests. For example, how a store manager values collective welfare (e.g., environmental responsibility) can inspire sales associates to engage in selling green products while managing their sales targets, or can shape how novel product attributes, such as recyclability, biodegradability, and ethical sourcing, can best be promoted. Second, the notion of stewardship implies that people may not fully realize the longer-term consequences of near-term actions. Marketing research on self-control and self-regulation can offer insights into the trade-offs between near-term actions and longer-term consequences of such decisions. This underlines marketing’s unique capacity to conceive solutions that are both resilient and sustainable to collective interests across time; this could involve intergenerational product positioning, and potentially influence environmentally-friendly behaviors across different stakeholders. Third, stewardship affords an equitable distribution of rewards, which indicates the integrity and respect of a shared value approach to contributors to economic and social activity. Marketing’s deep understanding of value can inform facilitation of shared value(s) between stakeholders in multiple domains. This is, perhaps, particularly the case in complex services, which are often characterized by complex power, knowledge, and experiential asymmetries (Keeling et al., 2021 ). Based on this foundation from the stewardship literature, we identify three principles to guide the transformation of marketing strategy in becoming increasingly responsible , resilient, and respectful .

The Responsible principle requires giving voice to all marketing stakeholders for a shared vision of what constitutes a well-balanced and sustainable offering. This principle can be advanced by being approached in a manner that is mutually beneficial to other long-term organizational goals, especially when these offerings challenge conventional thinking or center on short-term benefits. For example, marketing scholars can collaborate with organizations to understand how service firms can adapt to support refugees, and how novel approaches can also strengthen relationships with existing customers. This approach requires extending the focus of scholarly marketing research to include themes that are traditionally not considered to be ‘marketing’, as well as articulating social benefits alongside economic ones. For example, marketing scholarship can make a substantive contribution to public health policy by addressing such issues as how to combat stigmatization in mental health campaigns and how to heighten engagement in health communities among stigmatized patients. Conversely, it also involves taking a fresh look at traditional topics of academic inquiry and revisiting them with a responsibility perspective, in which balancing the needs of individuals and societal concerns are in fact key priorities of the organization. For example, the Responsible Research in Business and Management network encourages research that aligns with this principle ( www.rrbm.network ). Thus, marketing scholarship can help to advance UN SDGs, such as promoting good health and wellbeing (SDG 3), and responsible consumption and production (SDG 12).

The Resilient principle is based on continuous improvement through self and group reflections. Here, the focus is on ensuring and enculturating operational effectiveness and sustainability. This is achieved through establishing world class infrastructure and supply chains, and appropriately harnessing innovation and entrepreneurship. The Covid-19 crisis has exposed the vulnerability of international supply chains, as well as cash and information flows; firms need to develop resilience strategies to deal with this moving forward. Firms are currently revisiting their (ethical) sourcing and procuring (e.g., support of local suppliers), and manufacturing and contactless delivering systems (e.g., Amazon’s last mile concept) to fulfil the changing needs of channel partners and end-consumers. Furthermore, the pandemic-driven surge in peer-to-peer home delivery services (e.g., Instacart, UberEats) has introduced novel dilemmas for firms in terms of product safety, brand management and uniformity, and developing a sustainable workforce. Resilience could also be viewed in terms of marketing’s contribution to alleviating poverty and addressing potential issues associated with climate change, natural resource sustainability, and social instability.

The Respectful principle focuses on enabling different levels of aspiration within a fair society. Equality, diversity, and social inclusion underpin this principle to ensure that vulnerable, disadvantaged, and previously marginalized communities are empowered to make their own meaningful contributions in marketplaces. Mars (a manufacturer of confectionery, pet food, and other food products) revised its advertising code based on the principle of respect, pledging to facilitate casting that ‘ reflects the true diversity of the consumer base that we sell to, as determined by gender, race, sexuality, age, ability, class’ and to portray people as ‘empowered actors and full personalities, rather than using stereotypes ’ (Whiteside, 2021 ). There is a plethora of research themes stemming from the respectful principle, such as implicit gender bias in conversational AI-agents, and rebranding and advertising in times of increased social-political movements (e.g., MeToo, Black Lives Matter). Conversely, uncovering research themes from cases like The Wine Noire, an African American women-owned wine collective organized around an equitable and sustainable supply chain and logistic services for female winemakers and winemakers of color, might inform an agenda of research action.

Mapping the conversation

To further the discussion of the Responsible, Resilient, and Respectful principles, we illustrate current scholarly conversations using a bibliometric approach. This approach organizes the literature by identifying important contributors, contributions, and knowledge structures (Zupic & Čater, 2015 ). Informed by past JAMS editorials, four authors debated and selected keywords relevant to the three principles. 1 We used this curated set of keywords to identify and select articles published in the six leading marketing journals listed in the FT 50 journal ranking. 2 An initial search and article extraction performed on Scopus ( www.scopus.com ) resulted in a sample of 536 articles. We examined each article’s title, keywords, and abstract to determine its relevance to the three principles and retained a final sample of 254 articles.

Annual scientific production (in terms of publications) in our sample has increased substantially over the period considered (1973 to May 2021), exhibiting a compound annual growth of 6.12%. The first production peak is in 1997 with nine articles that broadly examine pro-environmental and pro-social marketing strategies, as well as the impact of these strategies on consumers’ perceptions of firms. The annual scholarly outputs have grown steadily every year since 2011, as evidenced by the 18 articles already published by May 2021. Among the six leading marketing journals we selected, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science dominates this literature domain (86 articles), followed by the Journal of Marketing (57 articles) and the Journal of Consumer Psychology (51 articles). We assessed authors’ influence by examining the total number of articles published and citations accumulated by each author. Julie Irwin (McCombs School, University of Texas) is the most prolific author in our sample with a total of seven articles, whereas CB Bhattacharya (Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburg) leads the citations ranking with 5012 total citations across five publications.

To identify the intellectual structure of this literature domain, we constructed a bibliometric network with VOS Viewer using bibliographic coupling (Fig.  1 3 ). Bibliographic coupling examines similarities between articles in a collection by considering the number of cited references that the articles share (Zupic & Čater, 2015 ). This analysis revealed seven clusters of articles representing distinctive lines of inquiry. We named these clusters to reflect the substantive focus of the scholarly contributions included therein, and then grouped them according to the principles (Table ​ (Table1 1 ).

Bibliometric visualization of the literature according to the Responsible, Resilient, and Respectful principles

Responsible, Respectful, and Resilient principles literature clusters

Notes: a The table includes the top three articles in each cluster by normalized number of citations. The normalization takes into consideration that more recent articles had less time to accumulate citations. The formula is as follows: N o r m a l i z e d - c i t a t i o n s - f o r - a n - a r t i c l e = T o t a l - c i t a t i o n s - o f - a n - a r t i c l e A v e . - c i t a t i o n s - f o r - a l l - a r t i c l e s - p u b l i s h e d - i n - t h e - s a m e - y e a r - i n c l . - i n - s a m p l e   

b Key: JM = Journal of Marketing; JCP = Journal of Consumer Psychology; JCR = Journal of Consumer Research; JMR = Journal of Marketing Research; JAMS = Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science

The conceptual building blocks of the Responsible principle are reflected in Clusters A, B, and C. Articles in the largest cluster (A – Green consumption) examine factors leading to consumer preferences for environmentally-friendly and ethically sourced products, as well as associated persuasion strategies. Taking a broader perspective, contributions in the second largest cluster (B – Responses to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies) examine how consumers’ react to firms’ CSR associations. The articles within these clusters are closely connected with the research in Cluster C (Stakeholder relationships) that explores how CSR contributes to corporate reputation among external firm’s stakeholders. In short, despite the extensive conversations regarding corporate responsibility issues, further research needs to focus on how marketing approaches the CSR agenda to encourage even more sustainable behaviors that appeal to a wider range of stakeholders.

The Resilience principle is well represented by Clusters D and E. Cluster D’s (Sustainable marketing strategies) research revolves around green approaches that inoculate marketing from environmental challenges, including enviropreneurialism, corporate environmentalism, and organizational capabilities for resilience. Articles in Cluster E (CSR strategies and firm performance) examine strategic outcomes of CSR investments, including firm market value, firm idiosyncratic risk, and customers’ product and brand evaluations. In sum, the Resilience principle incorporates seminal conceptualizations of sustainability and CSR marketing strategies as drivers of firms’ competitive advantage. However, recent external challenges (e.g., the COVID pandemic) call for a re-examination of these ideas to re-imagine marketing capabilities that will increase the resilience of firms.

The Respectful principle is represented by Clusters F and G. Cluster F’s (Ethical consumption) research concentrates on ethical consumer choices in the context of environmental sustainability, cause-related initiatives, stakeholder collaborations, and other ethical initiatives. Articles in Cluster G (Ethical marketing strategies) includes contributions elucidating the relationship between marketing strategy and CSR initiatives to achieve organizational effectiveness and ethical managerial decision making. As depicted in Fig.  1 , research on the Respectful principle is somewhat more dispersed and often disparate from other conversations. However, research inspired by the Respectful principle has the potential for many substantive future contributions that will shape how organizations interact with diverse, vulnerable, and underrepresented stakeholder groups.

A little more impact please …

Current societal expectations set within the broader context of the UN SDGs, recognition of the individual value of research endeavors (San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment, DORA, https://sfdora.org/ ), and the move towards wide-scale Open Access of research, mean that the position, nature, and value of academic research in society is being reexamined. This is also the case for business research. For instance, the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB, www.aacsb.edu/ ) has expanded its accreditation standards to include ‘engagement and social impact’, a change which is directly tied to the UN SDGs. In parallel, the traditional academic role is changing within Higher Education, as distinct career pathways develop that recognize differing, yet complementary, expertise in research, education, and enterprise. Together, these drivers offer opportunities for further innovation in the field of marketing, integral to which is a change in how marketing scholars and practitioners understand, discuss, and measure research ‘impact’ and how changes in our academic environment offer further channels for development.

With respect to research impact, marketing, as an applied discipline, has consistently examined the ‘fitness’ of research as defined by its relevance and robustness in today’s dynamic environment. The Responsible, Resilient, and Respectful principles that we outline can provide a guide toward articulating impactful contributions to knowledge and practice. As a discipline, marketing is well-placed to develop the opportunities within each of these principles with respect to marketing strategy. We offer Table ​ Table2, 2 , which identifies example research questions that connect each of the stewardship principles to the UN SDGs, as an initial template in framing research impact for marketing strategy moving forward.

Examples of future marketing research questions at the intersection of stewardship principles and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs)

With respect to the changing academic environment, like many other disciplines, the marketing discipline’s application of impact metrics is in flux and will continue to change in the coming years. The current assessment of output impact based on output levels (typically published journal articles) and using mainly numerical indicators is being challenged (e.g., through institutions committing to the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment). Instead, applying the Responsible principle, there is now a demand for broader (e.g., AltMetrics) and more qualitative evaluations of research impact. This demand will drive change in the types of output that articulate how marketing scholars undertake research that generates value for multiple stakeholders. In developing a cohesive narrative of the impact value of scholarly marketing research, there is an opportunity to broaden the definition of impact to include impactful outcomes , in addition to impactful outputs . For example, impactful outcomes due to changes in the marketing strategies that promote electric vehicle adoption will bring a corresponding positive change in the quality of life of consumers by improving air quality. Or consider the example of altering marketing strategies to combat youth obesity by restricting when and where sugary drinks and other junk food can be advertised. At the same time, marketing scholars can also examine the thresholds and timeframes for reasonable expectations about the impact that marketing strategy can achieve.

Furthermore, researchers often navigate the tension between generating research that addresses the need for academic relevance and robustness alongside the need for societal relevance and robustness. Academic relevance (in how contributions and implications are framed) and robustness (in how methodological approaches are framed) are familiar building blocks in the literature. However, due to a broad scope, the marketing discipline has less clarity and consensus on societal relevance and societal robustness . Societal relevance directly asks: ‘What societal challenge does this research contribute to?’ Societal robustness demands not only value for money, but also, more fundamentally, research accessibility and usefulness. An impact framework that integrates outcomes valued by multiple stakeholders can help guide the marketing discipline’s pursuit of high impact research with a societal focus. Such a framework can readily be devised in directly linking the reimagining of marketing strategy to the UN SDGs (such as in Table ​ Table2) 2 ) to enable researchers to articulate the value of their research in terms of mutual relevance, robustness and value.

The Resilient principle calls into question the longevity of what marketing research and practice offers, and how this contributes to sustainable solutions for society. The nature of published content undoubtedly needs to be more diversified to effectively meet the demands of differing audiences. Journal articles are an important means of mobilizing knowledge in academia and for other ‘users’ of research who are able to access such sources. However, journal articles are one part of a wider portfolio of content and services that could fulfil the different needs and purposes of society. Many universities and academics are already diversifying their research portfolios, both in terms of the content produced and services offered (e.g., professional development opportunities directly extending from research), alongside the approaches to communication of outcomes (e.g., podcasts, open access toolkits). This trend will help develop sustainable solutions, especially with respect to the UN SDGs. For example, creating health communications in collaboration with the intended audiences can result in tools that are readily accepted by those audiences, in terms of language, format and content, to bring about the intended impact.

The existing tension is often a simple one: How might we best develop and share proven methods or tools to embed them in practice, and in such a way that this effort is also recognized as a valuable scholarly activity? Companies and communities want to work with academics, but the outcomes they value are not always easily aligned with the outputs valued by academia. This is by no means a new challenge, but the conversation about impact potentially changes the perspective of said challenge. One promising development, in our view, to meet this challenge is the current change in emergent specialist career pathways. These pathways will broaden the way in which academic work is conducted and delivered, thus, impacting traditional research portfolios (i.e., in terms of outputs and outcomes). That is, marketing academics specializing in education are updating pedagogical approaches for future academics and practitioners to aid marketing strategy in coping with global challenges. Those specializing in knowledge exchange are innovating how knowledge about developing marketing strategy is mobilized in multiple formats to reach wider and more diverse user groups. Finally, those specializing in relevant enterprise are driving practical changes in marketing strategy through the commercialization of academic research into valuable products to society. The emergence of these new pathways provides opportunities to not only better address the questions laid out in Table ​ Table2, 2 , but also presents exciting opportunities for academics to further develop new capabilities, for example, their entrepreneurial skills, that complement existing academic skillsets.

More fundamentally, the move towards embracing representatives of a broader society as both co-creators and drivers of the research process is completely changing the conversation between marketing and society. The Respectful principle assumes co-creation. A distinctive strength that marketing strategy scholars bring to the literature is their experience and expertise in working with stakeholders in the field (e.g., consumer groups, nonprofits, companies, governmental agencies). Thus, marketing strategy can leverage these insights to support the development of rigorous research focused on pursuing the grand challenges that are more directly linked to those who are most impacted. The concept here is that outputs and outcomes are not delivered to ‘users’, but rather co-created with stakeholders in society. There are multiple emerging co-creation processes across disciplines and sectors. In healthcare, for example, the principle of respect is embedded within the process of co-production (e.g., https://www.nihr.ac.uk/documents/co-production-in-action-number-three/26382 ). Engaging non-academic partners as co-creators means being respectful of their lived experiences and how it shapes their active creator roles, as well as rebalancing power structures to allow multiple voices to be heard.

At the same time, it is important to respectfully acknowledge and accommodate individual or group heterogeneity in terms of motivation, knowledge and ability to co-create. New approaches (that are to be celebrated in our estimation) involve training non-academic co-creators in research methods. Conversely, in the future, non-academic co-creators can also train academics in this manner. As marketing scholars are aware, the integration of resources in the form of knowledge, skills, experience, enterprise, and networks creates connections and builds awareness between stakeholders to heighten impact. This connectivity is especially valuable where stakeholders have not had an opportunity to meet, discuss, and share ideas previously. Using the UN SDGs, it is possible to identify situations in which stakeholder groups have not had this opportunity, especially groups who are perceived as more vulnerable. An additional benefit of building co-creation opportunities with vulnerable groups is increased transparency and trust between the academic and wider communities. Conflicts can emerge during such collaboration, especially where there has been little previous interaction, but facilitating resolution of this conflict is impactful in its own right. Marketing, with its keen understanding of stakeholder perspectives, can empower groups of stakeholders to move away from normalized or entrenched expert knowledge and solutions. In doing so, groups of co-creation partners can truly deliver outcomes that are very much ‘fit for purpose’ (e.g., in relation to innovative solutions to address aspects of the UN SDGs). We see marketing as a discipline that is well-positioned to take the lead in developing and fostering diverse multi-disciplinary groups to bring about this shift.

Embracing the broader changes in academia, the outcome we seek here is a renewed call for the facilitation of better marketing strategy that will boldly address society’s grand challenges, and contribute to tackling the UN SDGs through responsible, resilient, and respectful research collaborations with stakeholders.

Supplementary Information

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

1 Our selection of keywords included: societal, corporate social responsibility, social responsibility, CSR, sustainability, sustainable, ethics, ethical, cause-related, environmental, stewardship, vulnerable, disenfranchise, equality, diversity, inclusivity, morality, empowerment . This set of keywords allowed us to extract a comprehensive literature sample that delineates the core themes in marketing strategy relevant to the three principles. We acknowledge that this set of keywords is not comprehensively conclusive. Within the context of this editorial, our analysis is intended as a conversation and action starter.

2 Journals included: Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Marketing Science .

3 To reduce visual complexity and aid interpretation, we set the minimum number of article citations to five and excluded articles without links in the collection. This resulted in a total of 196 articles that were visualized in the figure by normalized number of citations.

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The most important marketing metric is driving business growth.

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Marketing's job is to drive business growth.

Over the past few years, many CEOs have encountered the same problem: the organization's media is more efficient than ever, but the business isn’t growing.

As digital, CRM, and more have evolved to create an abundance of digitally-infused customer experience activities, marketers have become responsible for an ever-growing list of options for how to spend their marketing dollars. While these innovations and the MarTech solutions that come with them have added immense value for the industry, they have also posed challenges for CMOs who’ve become deeply focused on optimizing each and every channel to ensure their reporting to the C-suite demonstrates value. The bigger picture – driving business growth – took a back seat.

Understandably, CEOs and their CFO counterparts appreciate some level of cost certainty for their marketing spend. Optimizing for channels provides comfort because it helps manage cost. Marketing’s job, however, is to drive growth – not simply manage cost.

Now, the industry’s best are demanding a shift to reposition marketing as a growth driver. In doing so, they’re fostering realignment on what marketing is responsible for among CEOs, CFOs, and beyond – all for the betterment of the business. Here’s how they’re doing it.

Prioritize Cultural Relevance and Brand

Don’t let performance marketing bog you down. For brands with some scale, prioritizing a marketing mix model that includes driving cultural relevance through brand marketing can make a big difference.

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According to research from X (Twitter ), a quarter of consumer’s purchasing decisions are linked to a brand’s cultural involvement. Consumers aged 18-35, who have long been a priority due to their purchasing power, feel even more strongly that the brands they purchase align with culture. These aren’t just idyllic consumer responses – there’s proof.

When travel company Airbnb lost 80% of its business due to the Covid-19 pandemic, it simply could not afford to let marketing manage costs; it needed to be a growth driver. CEO, Brian Chesky, and Global Head of Marketing, Hiroki Asai, aligned on a shift from primarily performance-driven marketing to instead focus on brand campaigns – connecting with customers rather than buying them.

As Asai shared on the Marketing Today podcast, “When you’re over-indexed on performance, you don’t really have the opportunity to put a narrative out there to tell your story.” Instead, a brand-forward approach allowed Airbnb to do just that, linking it to the culture of modern traveling. According to Asai, those brand campaigns, “strike a chord and get to a deeper shared experience of humor or awe or irony about travel that we all love.”

By 2023, Airbnb made the Fortune 500 list for the first time ever, citing a revenue jump of 40.2% year over year .

With results like that, Chief Financial Officer Dave Stephenson praised the approach stating , “Our brand marketing results are delivering excellent results overall with a strong rate of return, and it’s been so successful that we’re actually expanding to more countries.”

Think Beyond the Television Screen

While Airbnb did make a splash through some memorable television spots, modern brand marketing requires thinking beyond that screen.

With endless content options, it’s become increasingly difficult to win consumer attention. The Interactive Advertising Bureau recently reported that in 2024, digital video spend is expected to surpass linear for the first time. At the same time, research from Bulbshare found that 99% of Gen Z say they’ll hit ‘skip’ on an ad if it’s an option. As media dollars and consumer behaviors shift, a holistic marketing mindset must be applied to build brand.

Soda brand Poppi, whose team has called it a “ creator-first brand ,” has leaned in on influencer partnerships and experiences as part of its brand strategy. Most recently, they took a big swing by engaging one of the most well-known TikTok influencers, Alix Earle, for their activation at the popular music festival Coachella. While many brands set up experiential activations and wide-ranging influencer partnerships, Poppi invested big in Earle – her cultural relevance, 6.6 million TikTok followers, and power to drive trends.

In a custom luxury house with over-the-top Poppi branding and merchandise, Earle’s partnership generated 4.5 million engagements, reaching over 275 million people. Poppi’s previous influencer partnerships have helped catapult the brand to the number one selling soft drink on Amazon, entering 5 million monthly new households in 2024.

As director of brand awareness and culture, Sophia Sesto shared with Ad Age , “You can’t 100% measure what it does in terms of a sale, but I'm already seeing so many videos in our TikTok tags, viral or not, with people talking about the ‘Alix Earle effect’ and going to the store and buying Poppi … It really is just [about] looking for brand awareness.”

Step Back, Evaluate, and Build a Winning Strategy

Taking big brand swings can require a little faith, but they don’t need to be built without data. Marketers looking to make a shift can start small, evaluate new ways to measure impact, and gradually develop a plan that works for the entire C-suite.

Brand marketing may not pay off as predictably as performance marketing, but the strategic shift will set you up for greater long-term business success. It’s time for marketers to drive a move away from the performance marketing obsession; they must be less safe and tactical and more strategic and growth-focused. When the CEO, CMO, and CFO realign on marketing’s role - and the levers that must be pulled to drive real business growth - the company will ultimately win.

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The Home Insurance Crunch: See What’s Happening in Your State

By Christopher Flavelle and Mira Rojanasakul

As climate change makes disasters more frequent and severe, the insurance industry is in tumult. Losses have been spreading beyond states that have been ravaged by hurricanes and wildfires, like Florida and California, and into places like Iowa, Arkansas, Ohio, Utah and Washington. Even in the Northeast, where homeowners insurance was still generally profitable last year, trends are worsening.

Find your state:

Source: AM Best

Ratio of revenue to costs for homeowners insurance statewide.

To measure the financial health of the homeowners insurance industry, The New York Times assembled data that compares revenues with costs for insurers in each state.

The data show that homeowners insurance was unprofitable in 18 states last year, up from eight in 2013. Most of those states are in the interior of the country, hit by severe storms and hail in the Midwest and Southeast, and wildfires in much of the West. In response to those losses, insurers have raised premiums, narrowed coverage and dropped customers, and even entirely withdrawn from some states.

As Insurers Around the U.S. Bleed Cash From Climate Shocks, Homeowners Lose

It’s not just California and Florida now: Insurers are losing money around the country. It means higher rates and, sometimes, cancellation notices.

Having Trouble With Your Homeowners Insurance? Tell Us.

Bills are soaring. Insurance companies are struggling. We want to hear how it’s affecting you.

A shaky insurance market threatens the entire economy. Without insurance, banks won’t issue a mortgage; without a mortgage, most people can’t buy a home. With fewer buyers, real estate values are likely to decline, along with property tax revenues, leaving communities with less money for schools, police and other basic services.

Insurers are regulated by states, which are trying different strategies to shore up the industry: Making it easier for companies to raise premiums or encouraging homeowners to make their homes more resilient to damage. It’s not yet clear if any of those strategies are working, especially as Americans keep moving to high-risk areas and as climate change gets worse.

“Insurance is where many people are feeling the economic impacts of climate change first,” said Carolyn Kousky, associate vice president for economics and policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. “That is going to spill over into housing markets, mortgage markets, and local economies.”

See the rest of the country:

Nationally, over the last decade insurers paid out more in claims than they received in premiums, according to the ratings firm Moody’s, and those losses are increasing.

Losses in some states have been worse than in others. In the charts below, each state is on its own scale. To compare all the states on the same scale, click the “shared scale” button.

Home Insurance Profitability in Every State

Methodology

Insurance profitability charts show the direct combined ratios in the homeowners sector, which are calculated by dividing costs from payouts and other expenses by revenue from premiums. Combined ratios data was provided by AM Best, based on regulatory filings from insurance companies. The 2023 figures reflect 98 percent of companies reporting.

Direct combined ratios do not include reinsurance payments. Insurers that run an operating loss can still make money by investing their revenue.

Direct combined ratios usually present unprofitable years as having a ratio greater than 100, and profitable years as having a ratio of less than 100. To make the data easier to interpret, the charts in this article use an inverted Y axis, so that unprofitable years appear as negative values and profitable years as positive values.

Data cited on insured losses do not account for inflation.

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The stock market will inflate another 20% before the bubble bursts, research firm says

• The stock has another 20% rise left in it before the bubble deflates, Capital Economics predicted.
• The research firm forecast the S&P 500 to notch 6,500 before staging a correction. 
• That's because stocks tend to inflate rapidly right before the end of a bubble, the firm said. 

Investors on the lookout for signs of a bubble should expect the stock market to be pumped up by another 20% before correcting, Capital Economics researchers said. 

The research firm pointed to the latest run-up in stocks, with the S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average recently notching fresh records and major indexes headed for new all-time highs as the week kicked off on Monday. 

But investors trying to push the bull market higher should know that there's only so much more the market can gain. According to John Higgins, Capital Economics' chief market economist, stocks look like they're in a late-stage bubble, meaning equities are in for a steep rally before the bubble eventually bursts.

"There's always the temptation to sort of chase the market higher, but I'm not convinced that you should be doing that at this stage. The … story that we've been telling a year or so ago appears to be coming true," Higgins said in a recent podcast. "What is that story? I think that it's a simple one really that involves a bubble inflating in the stock market," he said, pointing to the excitement for big tech.

Wall Street's enthusiasm for AI mirrors the hype around internet stocks in the 90s, Higgins noted, which should be an omen for the market. The Nasdaq Composite lost 77% peak-to-trough in the early 2000s, with the overall market seeing $5 trillion in value wiped out by 2002.

It's "impossible" to predict when the bubble will finally burst, how deep stocks will fall, or what will trigger the correction, Higgins noted. But one could come as soon as the end of next year, he suggested, as that would lengthen the pandemic bull market to about 5 years, the lifespan of the dot-com bubble.

He predicted the S&P 500 could notch 6,500 by the end of 2025. That implies another 22% run-up in stocks before the bubble begins to deflate. 

"Bubbles tend to inflate the most in their final stages as the excitement sort of reaches fever-pitch," Higgins warned. 

Other market commentators have warned stocks look to be in a bubble , with stock prices blowing past a series of record highs in 2024. More extreme forecasters have predicted that stocks could crash as much as 65% as the hype for AI rapidly unwinds. 

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Soup-To-Nuts Podcast: Organic advocates ask legislators for funding, market data and research support as Farm Bill negotiations continue

20-May-2024 - Last updated on 20-May-2024 at 12:27 GMT

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The annual fly-in event was the capstone for the Organic Trade Association’s Organic (OTA) Week, during which industry and government leaders came together to analyze market trends and consumer insights, celebrate a 3.4% increase in organic sales in 2023 and expanded public-private partnerships, address challenges, such as a proliferation of eco-claims that are not held to the same rigorous standards as USDA Certified Organic, and explore opportunities for growth, including how to best reach the next generation of consumers.

In this episode of FoodNavigator-USA’s Soup-To-Nuts Podcast ​, OTA Co-CEO Matthew Dillion discussed the industry’s top four priorities for the upcoming farm bill, and OTA Co-CEO Tom Chapman shared highlights from the trade association’s 2024 Organic Industry Survey, which includes hot spots for organic and areas primed for growth or ready for innovation.

[Editor’s Note: Never miss an episode of FoodNavigator-USA’s Soup-To-Nuts podcast – subscribe ​ today.] ​

OTA zeros in on legislation that will 'empower the US organic industry to meet future challenges and consumer demands' ​

OTA’s long-planned lobbying day serendipitously fell a week after the House and Senate released its frameworks for the upcoming Farm Bill and days before the House Agriculture Committee’s May 23 meeting to mark up the new farm bill ​.

“It is a very important time for us to weigh in as farmers, as businesses, as aggregators and advocates for organic to explain why organic is good for the rural economy, good for our planet and good for the American farmer,” Dillon said.

OTA members’ first ask – for continued federal investment in organic infrastructure through the Organic Market Development Act – which would build upon a $300m commitment made by USDA in 2021 to support the transition of farmland to organic, including a one-time commitment of $75m for Organic Market Development grants, applications for which exceeded $200m – underscoring the need for more funding.

“It was wonderful to have that one time $75 million funding for those grants. The USDA received $218 million in requests. And we think there is even more need and demand from our farms and businesses for those resources to keep growing organic and get over the bottlenecks,” Dillon said.

He explained that the Organic Market Development Act seeks $75 million on an ongoing basis and annual funding to continue these programs. In the Senate Farm Bill framework, there is $50m to support these programs, which OTA is “happy to see,” but which Dillon says needs to be higher.

According to OTA, grants under OMD would focus on three project types – 24-month simplified equipment-only funding between $10,000 and $100,000 to help farmers buy and install new processing equipment; process, package and store product on farm; and access to markets and crop protection from weather and pests while waiting to go to market. The second tier would include 3-year market development grants between $100,000 and $3m with 50% cost share to develop new products, marketing avenues and consumer education. The last would be for grants of $100,000 to $3m with 50% cost share focused on processing capacity expansion.

Developing the organic is market is more than building supply – it is also developing demand, which requires increased consumer education. To help shoppers understand the benefits of organic and why they should buy it, OTA received a $2.2m Organic Market Development grant, which the trade group and its sister organization The Organic Center will match for a total of $4.4m. The grant will fund a three-year consumer education campaign.

OTA advocates for continuous improvement ​

OTA’s second ask is for support for the Continuous Improvement and Accountability in Organic Standards Act – or CIAO (HR 5973), which Dillon explained speaks to both a core tenet of the USDA organic label, and a shortcoming that has frustrated and confused consumers and left the industry vulnerable to competing eco-labels.

“The Organic Trade Association has been advocating for the continuous improvement and accountability and Organic Act for a number of years. And the reason we have is that organic is a public-private partnership between private sector and USDA National Organic Program. And they have been great partners in many, many ways. However, there have been places where the business community and the consumers [they] are trying to serve have evolving needs that the USDA has been slow to respond to,” said Dillon.

He explained the CIAO Act would require USDA to work with stakeholders in a five-year cycle that would require policymaking movement.

Dillon explained that the process outlined in CIAO would fit within and complement the existing National Organic Standards Board review process, which currently includes two meetings annually. Under the new process, the National Organic Program with input from NOSB and the public, would identify a list of regulatory priorities on which to begin rulemaking before the 5-year cycle ended.

Demand for dairy data to level the playing field ​

Like the CIAO Act, the third item on OTA’s wish list is for support for another no-cost, bipartisan bill – HR 6937, or the Organic Dairy Data Collection Act, which Dillon explained would help USDA design better organic programs, promote farm resilience and mirror conventional data collection.

“All agricultural producers of all crops or animal agriculture need good information to make business decisions, to know if they should be expanding production, contracting production, what is going on in the marketplace,” said Dillon.

“Conventional dairy producers have great data on the cost of feedstuffs, for example, so they understand that they might need to shrink or herd because the cost of corn or soy or hay is exceedingly high right now. And it is continuing to trend that way. In organic, we do not have access to the same data. And so our producers are not on a level playing field when it comes to making decisions about their business operations,” he added.

The Organic Dairy Data Collection Act would require USDA to collect the same data for organic dairy producers as for their conventional counterparts.

Additional research key to growth ​

The last item on OTA’s shortlist for members’ Hill visits was for improved stakeholder coordination and additional funding for organic research. Dillon explained this would include support for three bills – The Organic Science Research Investment Act (S. 2317) and The Rural Prosperity and Food Security Act of 2024, which would enhance organic research, and the bipartisan Strengthening Organic Agriculture Research (SOAR) Act (HR 2750), which would reauthorize and increase funding for the Organic Research and Extension Initiative from $60m to $100m.

“All farmers need good research that has applications in the field to improve their effectiveness and their efficiency and profitability,” said Dillon.

Organic is growing ​

Each of these requests would help drive growth across the US organic industry, which OTA research released at the conference pegged at $69.7bn in 2023 ​. As OTA Co-CEO Tom Chapman explained, this “new high” is “generally positive” and “better than previous years when organic has faced both confounding problems of inflation and supply chain.”

But, he added, the growth was uneven across categories – revealing opportunities for innovation and development to help the industry return to the double-digit gains it saw pre-pandemic.

OTA is optimistic about the future because additional research found organic manufacturers had higher confidence in its supply chains in 2023 and inflation is slowing – setting 2024 up to be a year of recovery for organic.

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Unpacking the Impact: What State Color and Food Additive Bans Mean for Your Products

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10 Truths About Marketing After the Pandemic

• Janet Balis

There’s no going back to the old normal.

The Covid-19 pandemic upended a marketer’s playbook, challenging the existing rules about customer relationships and building brands. One year in, there’s no going back to the old normal. Here are 10 new marketing truths that reveal the confluence of strategies, operations, and technologies required to drive growth in a post-Covid-19 world.

It’s safe to say that 2020 was a year like no other and that 2021 will certainly not revert back to the old normal. So, as marketers think about building brands during this year and beyond, what should we take away from the pandemic? What can we do to help companies grow faster? And how is marketing being redefined in the age of Covid-19?

• Janet Balis leads EY’s consulting professionals in the Americas focused on the customer agenda and revenue growth, including commercial excellence, customer experience and product innovation and also leads EY’s CMO practice. She has also served as a partner at Betaworks, publisher of The Huffington Post, and EVP Media Sales and Marketing at Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. Balis is on the global board of the Mobile Marketing Association and the International Television Academy of Arts and Sciences, and she is also an advisor to the Harvard Business School Digital Initiative. You can follow her on Twitter: @digitalstrategy.

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Wiley's 'fake science' scandal is just the latest chapter in a broader crisis of trust universities must address

Analysis Wiley's 'fake science' scandal is just the latest chapter in a broader crisis of trust universities must address

John Wiley & Sons Inc is a publisher of academic journals. The company, better known as Wiley, is listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and each year churns out more than 1,400 scientific and other publications across the world. Last year, it turned over more than US$2 billion ($3 billion).

Wiley is a silverback in the strange, circular marketplace of scientific publishing.

The researchers who write for these journals, and the academics who edit them, do this work largely unpaid. They are subsidised by the same universities that also pay healthy sums to then buy the journals in question.

This industry, estimated to be worth $45 billion, is underpinned by giant licks of taxpayer money — including from Australia, which spends $2 billion a year on medical research alone.

Last year, a strange thing happened at Wiley.

In March, it revealed to the NYSE a $US9 million ($13.5 million) plunge in research revenue after being forced to "pause" the publication of so-called "special issue" journals by its Hindawi imprint, which it had acquired  in 2021 for US$298 million ($450 million).

Its statement noted the Hindawi program, which comprised some 250 journals, had been "suspended temporarily due to the presence in certain special issues of compromised articles".

Many of these suspect papers purported to be serious medical studies, including examinations of drug resistance in newborns with pneumonia and the value of MRI scans in the diagnosis of early liver disease . The journals involved included Disease Markers, BioMed Research International and Computational Intelligence and Neuroscience.

As the months ticked by, the number of papers being withdrawn mounted by the hundreds.

By November, Wiley had retracted as many as 8,000 papers, telling Science it had "identified hundreds of bad actors present in our portfolio".

A month later, in exquisite corporatese, the company announced : "Wiley to sunset the Hindawi brand."

A window into a thriving, lucrative black market

The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Wiley has now pulled more than 11,300 papers and shuttered 19 journals. In the midst of it all, Wiley's chief executive Brian Napack was moved on.

The Hindawi scandal offers a window into a thriving black market worth tens of millions of dollars which trades in fake science, corrupted research and bogus authorship.

It also illustrates what is just another front in a much broader crisis of trust confronting universities and scientific institutions worldwide.

For decades now, teaching standards and academic integrity have been under siege at universities which, bereft of public funding, have turned to the very lucrative business of selling degrees to international students.

Grappling with pupils whose English is inadequate, tertiary institutions have become accustomed to routine cheating and plagiarism scandals. Another fraud perfected by the internet age.

Businesses openly advertise the sale of essays to desperate students, whose efforts are freighted with the expectations of far-away, often impoverished parents; their websites even have a toggle to select the grade you're willing to pay for.

Over an open chat, I asked a top-ranked essay provider on Google what I would have to pay for a masters-level, 3,000 word essay examining Homer's Iliad which would be guaranteed to score a high distinction. The answer took less than 60 seconds: $238.55. I was assured the paper would not trigger anti-plagiarism software.

This infection — the commodification of scholarship, the industrialisation of cheating — has now spread to the heart of scientific, higher research.

With careers defined by the lustre of their peer-reviewed titles, researchers the world over are under enormous pressure to publish. This is true in Australia, but it is especially true in poorer economies. An impressive number of publications in impressive-sounding journals can open the door to job opportunities and promotions. Citations have become a currency, and few institutions devote the time or resources to check the papers in question.

What is Australia doing about the problem?

Into this integrity gap has poured sharp practice. Shadowy online paper mills are selling authorship credits to those researchers willing to pay for them.

In remarks provided to investigative website Retraction Watch, the UK Research Integrity Office recently described the problem as vast: "These are organised crime rings that are committing large-scale fraud."

The mills, principally operating from China, India, Iran, Russia and other post-Soviet states, have even been planting stooges in editors' chairs at certain journals and paying bribes to others to ensure fake papers are published.

A recent Retraction Watch investigation allegedly identified more than 30 such editors, and kickbacks of as much as US$20,000. Academic publisher Elsevier has confirmed its editors are offered cash to accept manuscripts every single week. The British regulator said in January that one unnamed publisher "had to sack 300 editors for manipulative behaviour".

So, what is Australia doing about the problem?

In 2019, the federal parliament introduced new offences criminalising the advertisement of a commercial academic cheating service, with a penalty of up to two years in jail. The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency polices these provisions, and also has the power to block websites promoting essay mills. In 2022, it blocked access from Australia to 40 websites which had been attracting hundreds of thousands of visits.

These measures do not, of course, address research fraud itself.

More than a decade ago, the government claimed it had this particular problem in-hand, when the Commonwealth's peak research bodies — the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council — established a new quango to oversee the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research.

This Australian Research Integrity Committee (ARIC) declares that it works towards "ensuring high levels of community confidence in the integrity of Australian research" so that "the Australian public can have faith in research outcomes".

Calls for sweeping reform

In fact, ARIC has no role whatsoever in the investigation of academic misconduct.

In news which will surprise no one, governments have seen fit to leave that job to academics themselves: universities and research institutions are responsible for inquiring into allegations of research fraud in what is amicably described as "self-regulation".

ARIC's jurisdiction is smaller than the eye of a needle. It investigates only the process by which universities have conducted their investigations. Not their findings. And certainly not whether the allegations amount to a breach of the code.

The committee explicitly tells Commonwealth employees not to give it any evidence of wrongdoing where it is contained in Commonwealth documents, and warns whistleblowers it has no power to protect them from reprisals.

Australia's former chief scientist Ian Chubb, now with the Australian Academy of Science, is among many who are unimpressed with ARIC's role, and who have called for sweeping reform.

The academy says the current arrangements create "deficiencies in several areas such as coverage, accountability and transparency". Late last year, it called for the establishment of a "national oversight mechanism" to ensure the proper rooting out and deterrence of research fraud. That way, taxpayers "can be reassured that their money is invested in individuals and organisations committed to the highest standards of research conduct".

But the academy failed to grasp the nettle, and shied from the conflict of interest at the heart of the problem, proposing that universities still be allowed to run the misconduct inquiries themselves.

The problem is only becoming more urgent

Bruce Lander, the inaugural head of South Australia's anti-corruption commission, is among those who believe much more radical surgery is needed.

Lander points out the obvious (and somewhat universal) flaws of the self-regulatory regime. Reporters of misconduct, usually lower down the pecking order, fear their careers will be railroaded by having blown the whistle.

Universities suffer "a real disincentive" to carry out proper investigations, he says, not least because "it is not necessarily in the institution's best interests for it to become known that someone within the institution has engaged in research misconduct". They also have no powers to compel the production of evidence or even the cooperation of the accused, meaning "the opportunity to obtain evidence of that misconduct … is significantly reduced".

Lander says whatever financial drain such an investigatory body entails would be outweighed by the resulting "enhancement of the reputation for integrity" in the university and research sector.

The universities present a formidable lobby in Canberra, however, and have vociferously fought other attempts at regulation, including on questions of tertiary education standards and even the safety of their students on campus.

They have adopted a Wall Street-style approach to their missions, paying exorbitant salaries to their leaders and gunning for eye-watering surpluses . They are interested principally in the protection of their global rankings, to which they tie their prospects of attracting future fee-payers.

The problem is only becoming more urgent. The recent explosion of artificial intelligence raises the stakes even further. A researcher at University College London recently found more than 1 per cent of all scientific articles published last year, some 60,000 papers, were likely written by a computer.

In some sectors, it's worse. Almost one out of every five computer science papers published in the past four years may not have been written by humans.

Education was Australia's fourth-largest export industry last year. Even if realpolitik requires the putting to one side of noble, irritating questions of integrity and trust, shouldn't more be done to protect its value?

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2024 Housing Market Forecast and Predictions: Housing Affordability Finally Begins to Turnaround

As we look ahead to 2024 , we see a mix of continuity and change in both the housing market and economy. Against a backdrop of modest economic growth, slightly higher unemployment, and easing inflation longer term interest rates including mortgage rates begin a slow retreat. The shift from climbing to falling mortgage rates improves housing affordability, but saps some of the urgency home shoppers had previously sensed. Less frenzied housing demand and plenty of rental home options keep home sales relatively stable at low levels in 2024, helping home prices to adjust slightly lower even as the number of for-sale homes continues to dwindle. 

Realtor.com ® 2024 Forecast for Key Housing Indicators

Home Prices Dip, Improving Affordability

Home prices grew at a double-digit annual clip for the better part of two years spanning the second half of 2020 through 2022, a notable burst following a growing streak that spanned back to 2012. As mortgage rates climbed, home price growth flatlined, actually declining on an annual basis in early 2023 before an early-year dip in mortgage rates spurred enough buyer demand to reignite competition for still-limited inventory. Home prices began to climb again, and while they did not reach a new monthly peak, on average for the year we expect that the 2023 median home price will slightly exceed the 2022 annual median.

Nevertheless, even during the brief period when prices eased, using a mortgage to buy a home remained expensive. Since May 2022, purchasing the typical for-sale home listing at the prevailing rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage with a 20% down payment meant forking over a quarter or more of the typical household paycheck. In fact, in October 2023, it required 39% of the typical household income and this share is expected to average 36.7% for the full calendar year in 2023. This figure has typically ranged around 21%, so it is well above historical average. We expect that the return to pricing in line with financing costs will begin in 2024, and home prices, mortgage rates, and income growth will each contribute to the improvement. Home prices are expected to ease slightly, dropping less than 2% for the year on average. Combined with lower mortgage rates and income growth this will improve the home purchase mortgage payment share relative to median income to an average 34.9% in 2024, with the share slipping under 30% by the end of the year.

Home Sales Barely Budge Above 2023’s Likely Record Low

After soaring during the pandemic, existing home sales were weighed down in the latter half of 2022 as mortgage rates took off, climbing from just over 3% at the start of the year to a peak of more than 7% in the fourth quarter. The reprieve in mortgage rates in early 2023, when they dipped to around 6%, brought some life to home sales, but the renewed climb of mortgage rates has again exerted significant pressure on home sales that is exacerbated by the fact that a greater than usual number of households bought homes over the past few years, and despite stories of pandemic purchase regret , for the most part, these homeowners continue to be happy in their homes. 

This is consistent with what visitors to Realtor.com report when asked why they are not planning to sell their homes. The number one reason homeowners aren’t trying to sell is that they just don’t need to; concern about losing an existing low-rate mortgage is the top financial concern cited. Our current projection is for 2023 home sales to tally just over 4 million, a dip of 19% over the 2022 5 million total. 

With many of the same forces at play heading into 2024, the housing chill will continue, with sales expected to remain essentially unchanged at just over 4 million. Although mortgage rates are expected to ease throughout the course of the year, the continuation of high costs will mean that existing homeowners will have a very high threshold for deciding to move, with many likely choosing to stay in place.  Moves of necessity–for job changes, family situation changes, and downsizing to a more affordable market–are likely to drive home sales in 2024. 

Shoppers Find Even Fewer Existing Homes For Sale

Even before the pandemic, housing inventory was on a long, slow downward trajectory. Insufficient building meant that the supply of houses did not keep up with household formation and left little slack in the housing market. Both homeowner and rental vacancy remain below historic averages . In contrast with the existing home market, which remains sluggish, builders have been catching up, with construction remaining near pre-pandemic highs for single-family and hitting record levels for multi-family . 

Despite this, the lack of excess capacity in housing has been painfully obvious in the for-sale home market. The number of existing homes on the market has dwindled. With home sales activity to continue at a relatively low pace, the number of unsold homes on the market is also expected to remain low.  Although mortgage rates are expected to begin to ease, they are expected to exceed 6.5% for the calendar year. This means that the lock-in effect, in which the gap between market mortgage rates and the mortgage rates existing homeowners enjoy on their outstanding mortgage, will remain a factor. Roughly two-thirds of outstanding mortgages have a rate under 4% and more than 90% have a rate less than 6%.

Rental Supply Outpaces Demand to Drive Mild Further Decline in Rents

After almost a full year of double-digit rent growth between mid-2021 and mid-2022, the rental market has finally cooled down, as evidenced by the year-over-year decline that started in May 2023 . In 2024, we expect the rental market will closely resemble the dynamics witnessed in 2023, as the tug of war between supply and demand results in a mild annual decline of -0.2% in the median asking rent.

New multi-family supply will continue to be a key element shaping the 2024 rental market.  In the third quarter of 2023, the annual pace of newly completed multi-family homes stood at 385,000 units. Although absorption rates remained elevated in the second quarter, especially at lower price points, the rental vacancy rate ticked up to 6.6% in the third quarter. This uptick in rental vacancy suggests the recent supply has outpaced demand, but context is important. After recent gains, the rental vacancy rate is on par with its level right before the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, still below its 7.2% average from the 2013 to 2019 period.  Looking ahead, the strong construction pipeline– which hit a record high for units under construction this summer –is expected to continue fueling rental supply growth in 2024 pushing rental vacancy back toward its long-run average. 

While the surge in new multi-family supply gives renters options, the sheer number of renters will minimize the potential price impact. The median asking rent in 2024 is expected to drop only slightly below its 2023 level. Renting is expected to continue to be a more budget friendly option than buying in the vast majority of markets, even though home prices and mortgage rates are both expected to dip, helping pull the purchase market down slightly from record unaffordability. 

Young adult renters who lack the benefit of historically high home equity to tap into for a home purchase will continue to find the housing market challenging. Specifically, as many Millennials age past first-time home buying age and more Gen Z approach these years, the current housing landscape is likely to keep these households in the rental market for a longer period as they work to save up more money for the growing down payment needed to buy a first home. This trend is expected to sustain robust demand for rental properties. Consequently, we anticipate that rental markets favored by young adults , a list which includes a mix of affordable areas and tech-heavy job markets in the South, Midwest, and West, will be rental markets to watch in 2024.

Key Wildcards:

• Wildcard 1: Mortgage Rates With both mortgage rates and home prices expected to turn the corner in 2024, record high unaffordability will become a thing of the past, though as noted above, the return to normal won’t be accomplished within the year. This prediction hinges on the expectation that inflation will continue to subside, enabling the recent declines in longer-term interest rates to continue. If inflation were to instead see a surprise resurgence, this aspect of the forecast would change, and home sales could slip lower instead of steadying.
• Wildcard 2: Geopolitics In our forecast for 2023 , we cited the risk of geopolitical instability on trade and energy costs as something to watch. In addition to Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, instability in the Middle East has not only had a catastrophic human toll, both conflicts have the potential to impact the economic outlook in ways that cannot be fully anticipated. 
• Wildcard 3: Domestic Politics: 2024 Elections In 2020, amid the upheaval of pandemic-era adaptations, many Americans were on the move. We noted that Realtor.com traffic patterns indicated that home shoppers in very traditionally ‘blue’ or Democratic areas were tending to look for homes in markets where voters have more typically voted ‘red’ or Republican. While consumers also reported preferring to live in locations where their political views align with the majority , few actually reported wanting to move for this reason alone. 

Housing Perspectives:

What will the market be like for homebuyers, especially first-time homebuyers.

First-time homebuyers will continue to face a challenging housing market in 2024, but there are some green shoots. The record-high share of income required to purchase the median priced home is expected to begin to decline as mortgage rates ease, home prices soften, and incomes grow. In 2023 we expect that for the year as a whole, the monthly cost of financing the typical for-sale home will average more than $2,240, a nearly 20% increase over the mortgage payment in 2022, and roughly double the typical payment for buyers in 2020. This amounted to a whopping nearly 37% of the typical household income. In 2024 as modest price declines take hold and mortgage rates dip, the typical purchase cost is expected to slip just under $2,200 which would amount to nearly 35% of income. While far higher than historically average, this is a significant first step in a buyer-friendly direction.

How can homebuyers prepare? 

Homebuyers can prepare for this year’s housing market by getting financially ready. Buyers can use a home affordability calculator , like this one at Realtor.com to translate their income and savings into a home price range. And shoppers can pressure test the results by using a mortgage calculator to consider different down payment, price, and loan scenarios to see how their monthly costs would be impacted. Working with a lender can help potential buyers explore different loan products such as FHA or VA loans that may offer lower mortgage interest rates or more flexible credit criteria. 

Although prices are anticipated to fall in 2024, housing costs remain high, and a down payment can be a big obstacle for buyers. Recent research shows that the typical down payment on a home reached a record high of $30,000 .  To make it easier to cobble together a down payment, shoppers can access information about down payment assistance options at Realtor.com/fairhousing and in the monthly payment section of home listing pages. Furthermore, home shoppers can explore loan products geared toward helping families access homeownership by enabling down payments as low as 3.5% in the case of FHA loans and 0% in the case of VA loans .

What will the market be like for home sellers?

Home sellers are likely to face more competition from builders than from other sellers in 2024. Because builders are continuing to maintain supply and increasingly adapting to market conditions, they are increasingly focused on lower-priced homes and willing to make price adjustments when needed. As a result, potential sellers will want to consider the landscape for new construction housing in their markets and any implications for pricing and marketing before listing their home for sale.

What will the market be like for renters?

In 2024, renting is expected to continue to be a more cost-effective option than buying in the short term even though we anticipate the advantage for renting to diminish as home prices and mortgage rates decline. 

However, for those considering the pursuit of long-term equity through homeownership, it’s essential to not only stay alert about market trends but also to carefully consider the intended duration of residence in their next home. When home prices rise rapidly, like they did during the pandemic, the higher cost of purchasing a home may break even with the cost of renting in as little as 3 years. Generally, it takes longer to reach the breakeven point, typically within a 5 to 7-year timeframe. Importantly, when home prices are falling and rents are also declining, as is expected to be the case in 2024, it can take longer to recoup some of the higher costs of buying a home. Individuals using Realtor.com’s Rent vs. Buy Calculator can thoroughly evaluate the costs and benefits associated with renting versus buying over time and how many years current market trends suggest it will take before buying is the better financial decision. This comprehensive tool can provide insights tailored to a household’s specific rent versus buying decision and empowers consumers to consider not only the optimal choice for the current month but also how the trade-offs evolve over several years.

Local Market Predictions:

All real estate is local and while the national trends are instructive, what matters most is what’s expected in your local market. 

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