The world is experiencing one of the most profound crises in our history. Inflation is edging up, the cost of food and energy is rising and global supply chains are struggling to meet demand. People are enduring the loss of incomes, homes, and jobs. Millions of children are suffering from mental health problems as they struggle with loneliness, isolation, and the deaths of their friends and family members.
The global economy has entered a period of contraction that could be deeper, longer and more severe than the Great Depression. The cost of oil is soaring, threatening to push us into the first truly global energy crisis since the 1970’s. This is a complex and dangerous mix of shifts that has the potential to create a polycrisis, in which global shocks and their localized manifestations amplify and synchronize each other – with devastating consequences for human well-being.
In this article, we argue that the marketing discipline – particularly international marketing scholarship – is well-positioned to explore these issues because it views citizens as customers of national and international institutional entities and conceptualizes trust and well-being guidelines as parallel transaction flows exchanged between them. Our analysis builds on marketing and business theories of corporate social responsibility, psychological theories of attribution and blame, and sociopolitical theory of governance, institutions, and trust.
In the case of a global crisis, our research suggests that consumers will attribute differences in the severity of their country’s impact to how they believe these impacts are being handled by national and international institutions (e.g., a perception of greater responsibility for the crisis in high-local impact countries). This should lead to higher levels of institutional blame and lower levels of trust between citizens and these same institutions.