Johny Johansson

Marketing with Integrity

Today's massive marketing onslaught in the advanced economies has helped to lower rather than raise the quality of life, especially in America. There is considerable evidence of waste, excessive materialism, environmental destruction, and lack of the kind of happiness that material welfare was supposed to bring. Several reasons will be shown for why this has happened, and why a push towards a lowest common denominator in marketing has occurred. These include a lack of restraints on promotions, competitive overreach in product design and a diverse population. We will see how marketing's importance for the communications media has influenced how these media operate. With the result that marketing is seen as a major culprit in the increasingly materialistic and indulgent life of people in advanced countries, especially Americans, and a rise in anti-American sentiments. Johansson gives advice on how marketing's strengths and positive qualities can be harnessed without negative spillovers. A marketing course correction is already taking place in some socially responsive organizations.

Johny K. Johansson is the McCrane/Shaker Professor of International Business and Marketing, McDonough School of Business, Georgetown University, where he specializes in international marketing strategy and consumer decision-making. A native of Sweden, he is a graduate of the Stockholm School of Economics and University of California at Berkeley. His current research focuses on Japanese and European companies and markets.

Johansson has consulted and given executive seminars for companies worldwide, including General Electric, Marriott and Xerox in the U.S., Beiersdorff and Ford Werke AG in Germany, Volvo and Electrolux in Sweden, and Honda, Dentsu and Fuji film in Japan. He has conducted seminars at institutions ranging from Stanford, MIT, and Columbia University in the U.S. to France's INSEAD, Spain's IESE, Germany's University of Cologne, and Hebrew University in Jerusalem, to Kobe and Hitotsubashi Universities in Japan, Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Indian Institute of Management in Calcutta.

Johansson is author of Global Marketing, and co-author of Relentless: The Japanese Way of Marketing. His new book is In Your Face: How American Marketing Excess Fuels Anti-Americanism.

www.msb.georgetown.edu/faculty/johanssj/