Most executives know that how they respond to the challenge of sustainability will profoundly affect the competitiveness—and perhaps even the survival—of their organizations. Yet most are flailing around, launching a hodgepodge o f initiatives without any over arching vision or plan. That’s not because they don’t s e e sustainability as a s t ra tegic issue. Rather, it’s because t h e y think t h e y ’ r e facing an unprecedented journey fo r which there is no road map. But there is a road map. Our research into the forces that have shaped the competitive landscape in recent decades reveals that ―business megatrends‖ have features and trajectories in common. Sustainability is an emerging megatrend, and thus its course is to some extent predictable. Understanding how firms won in prior megatrends can help executives craft the strategies and systems they’ll need to gain advantage in this one. The concept of megatrends is not new, of course. Businessman and author John Naisbitt popularized the term in his 1982 best seller of the same name, referring to incipient societal and economic shifts such as globalization, the rise of the information society, and the move from hierarchical organizations to networks. Our focus is on business megatrends, which force fundamental and persistent shifts in how companies compete. Such transformations arise from technological innovation or from new ways of doing business, and many factors can launch or magnify the process of change. Business megatrends may emerge from or be accelerated by financial crises, shifts in the social realities that define the marketplace, or the threat of conflict over resources. The geopolitics of the Cold War, for example, drove the innovations that launched both the space race and rapid developments in the field of microelectronics—ultimately unleashing the information technology megatrend. Electrification, the rise of mass production, and globalization were also megatrends, as was the quality movement of the 1970s and 1980s. The common thread among them is that they presented inescapable strategic imperatives for corporate leaders.

The Sustainability Imperative

Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Marketing

The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity

Luxury in the digital age: A multi-actor service encounter perspective

Conceptualizing unconventional luxury

Moments of Luxury: A Qualitative Account of the Experiential Essence of Luxury

It is ironic that at a time when we have more quantitative data about consumers than ever before – so-called “big data,” scanner data, loyalty program purchase histories, trails of Internet searches and social media activity, and much more – that businesses nevertheless increasingly desire qualitative information. The two sets of methods also differ in their underlying assumptions about the nature of reality, the nature of evidence, causality, and factors that shape behavior. Unfortunately these differences often evoke an “either/or” approach on the part of researchers and audiences for their research. In both academic and applied research it is usually far more beneficial to adopt a “both/and” perspective and to select the best tool for the problem at hand. Otherwise, with a tool kit comprised of only a single tool, the “law of the hammer” tends to apply. If you only have a hammer in your tool kit, everything starts to look like a nail and we keep pounding away, regardless of the nature of the problem at hand.

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Russel W. Belk

Papers

Moments of Luxury: A Qualitative Account of the Experiential Essence of Luxury

Conceptualizing unconventional luxury

Qualitative versus Quantitative Research in Marketing