Exploring the pleiotropic effects of technology on society or making social lemonade from technological lemons: six rules for marketers

Since the 1960’s the customer has been at the focal point of business and the marketer’s job has been one of “identifying and meeting human and social needs” to create and deliver value to the customer. The result is that the marketer straddles the interface between technology and society, serving as both mediator and manager. In this research, I build towards a singular research goal; helping marketers understand the relationship between technology and society in a manner that provides them with the insight they need to deal effectively with the unintended consequences of technology. I begin this thesis by building the theoretical foundation needed to situate the five studies underlying this research. Next I introduce these studies in turn, outlining the question, methodology and results of each. Finally, I use the findings from these studies to address my original research question. This research topic is challenging because the world of technology and the social world are conflated. The terms ‘social’ and ‘technical’ are abstractions of a convoluted whole – society is embedded in technology and technology is embedded in society. To meet this challenge, I introduce and apply a new methodological approach for analyzing sociotechnical systems in the marketing domain. This approach has allowed me to answer the original research question on two levels ways. First, I developed a formal set of propositions to guide marketing researchers exploring the relationship between technology and society, and second I present marketing practitioners with six rules for dealing with the unexpected effects of socio-technical interactions, or more simply: six rules for making social lemonade from technological lemons. As this research shows, the inevitable unintended pleotropic consequences of technology’s impact on society and of society’s impact on technology create a constant flux of opportunity and risk and therefore represents a major challenge for marketers.