The Marketing Ecoverse: A Sustainable Confluence of Business, Social, and Natural Ecosystems

Abstract

Rebounding off the denaturized concept of business ecosystem, we develop an initial conceptualization of the marketing ecoverse. The marketing ecoverse refers to the confluence of three equally important types of ecosystems: business, sociocultural, and [natural] biogeophysical. We argue that the marketing ecoverse is based on shared natural phenomena, ecosystem functions, and native/inter-ecosystem service and disservice flows. The marketing ecoverse's self-regulative processes include material-to-moral signaling, resilience moderation, source-sink constraints, and artifact dispersal. A case of the growth and partial collapse of fourth-generation bike-sharing systems and their impact on African rural communities is presented to further illustrate the marketing ecoverse processes.