A Commentary on Culture, Sustainability and Market Transformations

In this retrospective commentary, I reflect on two of MGDR’s most downloaded articles to examine how the ideas presented in each position research for the seventh year of the MGDR journal. The articles selected are Fırat’s (2016) commentary on “The dynamics of the local and the global: implications for marketing and development” and Gonen’s (2019) review of Brown’s book in “Tim Brown, change by design: how design thinking transforms organizations and inspires innovation (2009)”. These two articles are, at least in my reading of them, complementary in that both address the significance of attending to culture in markets, alluding to the importance for humanity in finding new ways to tackle modern challenges of sustainability by connecting global and local contexts. But whilst the articles have been popular downloads (respectively, 4,868 and 25,674 at the time of writing), review suggests they have not been widely integrated into scientific [marketing] discourse with, according to Google Scholar, 7 and 12 citations apiece. So, what of the qualitative evaluation of the points raised in these articles? The next section briefly summarizes the articles before I comment on their synergies, impacts and implications for future.