The Academy of Marketing’s Annual Conference is an opportunity for marketing academics to engage in vibrant intellectual discussion and debate. This special issue celebrates the work presented at our 55th annual conference, held at the University of Birmingham in 2023. Promoting the conference theme of Marketing Revolution, the Call for Papers invited participants “to reflect on changes and shocks that require us to think and act differently, as well as opportunities for us to consider the need to revolutionise marketing theory and practice. As we continue to face environmental, social, political and economic challenges, it is time to take stock and propose ways to ensure that our theorisation, practices and research methods are open to new ways of doing things. Some of these ‘new’ approaches might mean seeking out ‘old’ or dismissed systems of knowledge or ways of doing that have been pushed aside. Others may require different ways of thinking, harnessing new technological developments or new material practices to do things better.” This agenda produced a conference with over 20 tracks and 17 expert driven workshops, each addressing cutting-edge theoretical, methodological or pedagogical issues.This resulting special issue asks how Marketing can play its part in helping to shape how society responds to economic, social, political, technological and cultural revolution. Eight papers successfully negotiated the review process and are presented here. Six of these papers address fundamental societal challenges and reflect a socially conscious approach to how marketing as a discipline can, through small acts of revolution, offer solutions to these challenges. A further two offer insights into both technological and branding responses to contemporary marketing practice.Food marketing, food consumption behaviour and food waste form the context for our first four papers. Using an ethics of care as their theoretical underpinning, Tonner et al. (2026) undertake a systematic review of food marketing scholarship published in world leading journals and come to the conclusion that research to date has been narrow in scope, positivistic in design, and that research subjects tend to be individual consumers, with psychological theories dominating the debate. Their paper addresses these challenges and offers thoughtful suggestions to redress these scholarship deficits, what they term, cyclical caring deficits, in food marketing. The ethics of care lens provides the basis for the paper to offer a caring agenda for food marketing scholarship. The paper can also be read as a blueprint for delineating and reimagining deficit scholarship across marketing theory and as a call for wider engagement with an ethics of care approach.In their paper “Not OK Boomer! Exploring Socialization and Conflict within the Context of Intergenerational Co-Parenting Families” Tang et al. (2026) consider the dynamics of intergenerational co-parenting within the cultural context of China. Food consumption behaviour offers an interesting and multi-layered canvas through which to study family relationships and interactions. By using a conflict lens through the framework of socialization theory, the paper examines the nature of conflictual relationships and their resulting dynamics, offering insights into the cultural complexities inherent in Asian family dynamics. Beyond this, the authors invite us to consider the impact of different approaches – conflict, conformity, compromise and congruence – to managing disagreements and adapting to changing social roles. Given the increasing prevalence of intergenerational co-parenting, the paper concludes with insights for crafting more inclusive marketing strategies.Singh, Jones and Dean’s (2026) work entitled “Assemblages, utterances and performativity: consumers’ experience of sustainable disposal of food waste”, reimagines how to address the challenges associated with food waste through recycling. Focusing on a newly implemented food waste collection trial scheme in the UK, the aim of the study is to explore the performativity of the recycling of food waste at the household level (drawing on the lived experiences of 49 residents) and to consider what (un)performing this act might mean for the consumers. By animating how assemblages, utterances and performativity impact consumers’ experiences, the authors offer insightful implications for theory and practice.Relatedly, food waste sorting is the focus of the work by Grassias and Piris (2026). In their paper “Bridging Social Practices and Individual Behaviour: Understanding Residential Psychological Mechanisms to Improve Recyclable Waste Sorting in Collective Housing” they argue that many policy interventions based on attitude-behaviour-choice models attempt to improve attitudes towards food waste sorting. However, the authors posit that these approaches are likely to have, at best, a moderate impact on behaviour because they lack an appreciation of the material, symbolic and social contexts in which sorting practices are embedded. Rather than critiquing extant approaches, the study contributes to a more integrative theory by combining critical insights from practice theory with concrete psychological levers. They offer a radical and actionable approach to achieving deeper systemic change through context-based interventions that focus on material affordances, residential norms and residential competencies.Our fifth and sixth papers both take a quantitative approach to exploring different aspects of brand strategy. Employing uses and gratification theory, alongside persuasion knowledge theory, Nikhashemi et al. (2026) examined the role of social commerce in shaping persuasion knowledge and driving positive brand-related outcomes. They offer a novel method to achieve their aims, employing structural equation modelling, spotlight analysis and probabilistic analysis to show that social commerce significantly encourages positive, persuasive communication when influenced by contextual factors such as content trustworthiness and media richness. In turn this helps the development of persuasion knowledge, leading to positive brand behavioural outcomes. This work offers important managerial implications for brands as they engage with social commerce platforms. Specifically, to encourage positive brand behaviours such as co-creation, switching resistance and advocacy, brands should enhance their content with credible and educational information to increase content reliability and persuasion knowledge. This, combined with user-generated content, creates more active and stronger brand communities.Stephanie Haddad’s (2026) paper asks the question: “How do self-brand congruity and emotional brand attachment affect the patronage of original and counterfeited luxury branded products?” Having administered an online questionnaire, Haddad employs structural equation modelling to reveal relationships between four dimensions of self-brand congruity (actual, ideal, social and ideal-social) and a multidimensional construct of emotional brand attachment that addresses affection, passion and connection. She finds that self-brand congruity has a positive impact on patronage of original luxury brands, but a negative effect on counterfeits. The paper offers insightful implications for marketing managers of luxury branded products, emphasising authenticity, affinity marketing strategies and emotional branding.Penultimately, the pioneering work of Gummerus et al. (2026) provides compelling insights into value co-destruction in the context of consumer ill-being and vulnerability. Employing the insights and experiences of parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), this research concludes that consumer vulnerability is experienced through engaging with services support systems where support is lacking, as well as the reality of the challenges of ASD as a lifelong condition. Their work offers three important contributions: a systematic value co-destruction typology; advancing understanding of ill-being within the marketing discipline; and extension of consumer vulnerability within service systems, in this case, the family. They propose a range of revolutionary mechanisms which aim to address value co-destruction and also reduce the harms of consumer ill-being.Finally, our eighth paper by Gil-Simmen et al. (2026), demonstrates how the convergence of technological, environmental and societal changes will have profound implications for marketing. However, they warn that marketing students are unprepared because of the limitations of conventional marketing education. Recognising pedagogy as a form of intervention, the authors propose a transformative pedagogic framework for marketing education (based on insights from praxis and sociocultural theories). One of the major contributions of this paper is the explicit attention to how educators create the conditions for students to acquire the necessary skills to become responsible marketing professionals. This lays the groundwork for future revolutions in which marketing theory and practice are continuously reimagined and improved.This special issue could not have come to fruition without the contributions of delegates to the numerous tracks and workshops at our AM2023 conference; we thank you all for your insightful work and participation in an excellent, thought-provoking conference. The Academy of Marketing annual conference is a site for intellectual endeavour, pushing the boundaries of our marketing imaginations, and in the spirit of this special issue, a call to remind us of our power to enact marketing revolution, even in incremental ways. The authors in this special issue are responsible for their own acts of revolution, inspiring new research agendas and future research directions; we thank them for contributing their work. We would also like to thank our reviewers for the constructive manner in which they approached the review process; their positive, critical engagement significantly shaped this special issue. We thank the Marketing Trust, the Chartered Institute of Marketing, the Worshipful Company of Marketors, Routledge, Oxford University Press, The Case Centre and the student Skill Store, for their generous sponsorship of the conference. Penultimately, we would like to thank our colleagues at the European Journal of Marketing, Greg Marshall, Debbie Keeling and Richard Whitfield, for their generous support of the Academy and this Special Issue.Our final thank you goes to our exceptional colleague Professor Finola Kerrigan, and her team at the University of Birmingham. This is a very special group of marketing academics who graciously hosted our annual conference in 2023. As an Academy we are incredibly grateful for the terrific work they performed in organising AM2023 which enabled this special issue to become a tangible outcome of the conference process.
Doherty et al. (Mon,) studied this question.