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Considers why customers resist innovations even though they are considered necessary and desirable. Identifies functional barriers such as usage, value, and risk, and psychological barriers such as tradition and image. Concludes that successful innovation lies not in bowing down to consumer resistance, but in understanding the causes and developing a marketing strategy to attack them.

The core idea of this article is that five key characteristics-market heterogeneity, sociopolitical governance, chronic shortage of resources, unbranded competition, and inadequate infrastructure-of emerging markets are radically different from the traditional industrialized capitalist society, and they will require us to rethink the core assumptions of marketing, such as market orientation, market segmentation, and differential advantage. To accommodate these characteristics, we must rethink the marketing perspective (e.g., from differential advantage to market aggregation and standardization) and the core guiding strategy concepts (e.g., from market orientation to market development). Similarly, we must rethink issues of public policy (e.g., from compliance and crisis driven to purpose driven) and the marketing practice (e.g., from glocalization to fusion marketing).

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How effectively business deals with the challenges of sustainability will define its success for decades to come. Current sustainability strategies have three major deficiencies: they do not directly focus on the customer, they do not recognize the looming threats from rising global over-consumption, and they do not take a holistic approach. We present a framework for a customer-centric approach to sustainability. This approach recasts the sustainability metric to emphasize the outcomes of business actions measured holistically in term of environmental, personal and economic well-being of the consumer. We introduce the concept of mindful consumption (MC) as the guiding principle in this approach. MC is premised on a consumer mindset of caring for self, for community, and for nature, that translates behaviorally into tempering the selfdefeating excesses associated with acquisitive, repetitive and aspirational consumption. We also make the business case for fostering mindful consumption, and illustrate how the marketing function can be harnessed to successfully implement the customer-centric approach to sustainability.