The notion that marketing can be a force for good has been around for at least five decades (e.g., Kotler and Levy 1969;Kotler and Zaltman 1971), and as marketing scholars, we are proud of the value that marketing can bring to society. However, we often face tough questions regarding marketing's dark side; is it the discipline that "is used to create and sustain the power of multinational corporations? Promoting the consumerism that is ruining our world? The never-ending advertising efforts to convince people to buy things they do not need?" (Lefebvre 2013, p. 1, preface).Facing growing criticism on the one hand (Kohli and Haenlein 2021; Mende and Misra 2021) and an increased understanding that societies face "grand" societal challenges (such as climate change, diversity and inclusion, and inequality) on the other hand-what has been the marketing scholarly community's response? While the marketing discipline has begun to address these challenges, this work is still considered a niche rather than mainstream area of investigation. In the top four marketing journals (

In late 2020, the first year of the global COVID pandemic outbreak, we issued a call for papers on well-being in a global world. Our underlying motivation was to induce further advancement of research relating to well-being issues and grand societal challenges in the context of international marketing. This call was more than successful in attracting interesting, relevant, and rigorous manuscripts in a number that allowed us to publish two JIM special issues. The first special issue appeared in June 2022 (Vol. 30, No. 2) and featured articles focusing on well-being relating to COVID-19 in different countries and contexts. In this second special issue, we present a compilation of articles relating to more general topics of well-being in a global context and discuss future research opportunities in this space.