Journal of Public Policy & Marketing Special Issue | Reclaiming Marketplace Inclusion as a Marketing Imperative

“Inclusion is not a passing trend, nor a niche concern to be revisited only when politically convenient. It is a defining challenge for marketing scholarship and practice in the years ahead.”

Special Issue Editors Samantha N.N. Cross, Rebeca Perren, Eileen Fischer, and Anders Gustafsson

The July 2026 Journal of Public Policy & Marketing Special Issue responds to a shifting cultural and political climate that has cast doubt on inclusion-related initiatives in business, education, and society.

At a moment when marketing’s relevance depends on its ability to reflect and serve diverse communities, this collection of short commentaries articulates inclusion as a core market logic—not a peripheral concern. Through concise, compelling contributions from 114 authors across 23 countries and six continents, this special issue:

• Reasserts inclusion as essential to market design, segmentation, and functioning.
• Demonstrates the risks of exclusion to consumers, brands, and market systems.
• Advances actionable insights for policy, teaching, and practice.

This powerful compilation touches on six main themes:

• A call for the marketing academy to be truly inclusive.
• Broadening the range of groups under consideration.
• Enablers and barriers that impact market participation for specific regions or groups.
• Foundations of current approaches to inclusion.
• Tools for evaluating inclusive market spaces and designing inclusive market offerings.
• The urgency of wider inclusion in digital spaces and technologies.

Across these themes, the commentaries collectively challenge narrow and often taken-for-granted understandings of inclusion, offering more expansive frameworks for thinking about participation, access, representation, and justice in the marketplace.

Together, the commentaries move from questions of who is recognized to where exclusion occurs, to how inclusion should be conceptualized and measured, and finally to the digital spaces where new exclusions are rapidly emerging. An anchoring editorial ensures the conversation reflects both theoretical insight and practical wisdom.

Editorial

Samantha N.N. Cross, Rebeca Perren, Eileen Fischer, and Anders Gustafsson, “Reclaiming Marketplace Inclusion as a Marketing Imperative”

At a time when the cultural and political climate worldwide has cast doubt on inclusion-related initiatives in business, education, and society, marketing scholarship plays a vital role. Across the six continents represented in this issue, the sociopolitical conditions shaping who is included in markets—and who is not—are shifting rapidly, and not always in the direction of greater inclusivity. In moments such as these, scholarly silence is not neutrality; it risks reinforcing the very exclusions that marketing, at its best, seeks to understand and redress. Marketing scholars are uniquely positioned to respond to these moments. We have the analytical frameworks to document exclusion as a market phenomenon, the empirical tools to measure its costs, and the policy interface to translate findings into action. As institutional actors step back from inclusion commitments, the discipline cannot afford to do the same. This special issue demonstrates that inclusion is not peripheral to marketing. Rather, inclusion is integral to the functioning of markets.

Critiquing and Calling for True Inclusivity in the Marketing Academy

Aaron J. Barnes and Esther Uduehi, “The Danger of Inclusion as Low-Hanging Fruit or Forbidden Fruit: Toward Structural Legitimacy in Marketing Scholarship”

Inclusion research—scholarship that intentionally examines how diverse and marginalized identities shape and are shaped by marketplace processes—occupies an unstable position in marketing. When cultural and political conditions foreground diversity, the field celebrates and embraces the work as timely, relevant, and necessary. When those conditions shift, the field labels the same work as too political, too narrow, or professionally risky to pursue. Our experiences reflect this pattern: The same research that earns praise in one moment can become delicate in the next, not because the insights changed, but because the institutional and regulatory climates have. These shifts reveal a problem that inspires this commentary.

Sterling A. Bone, Glenn L. Christensen, and Kaelyn N. Loveless, “Academic Courage in a Politicized Marketplace: How Evidence-First Race Research Can Move Policy (and Markets) Forward”

In the current environment, research on race in the marketplace sits at an uncomfortable crossroads. Public conversations are increasingly polarized, institutional language is shifting, and even well-intended initiatives can be quickly recast as political signals rather than scholarly or managerial efforts to understand how consumers and markets interact. For researchers and policymakers, this creates a real risk: Either the topic becomes so politicized that rigorous inquiry is avoided, or findings become interpreted through partisan frames regardless of what the data show.

Samuelson Appau, Marian Makkar, and Deborah Dede Narh, “The Interestingness Value of Including African Stories in Marketing and Public Policy Research”

How many articles about an African context have you seen published in top business journals? Not many? Exactly! Africa is home to more than 1.5 billion people, 54 countries, and the world’s youngest population. The continent provides diversity in marketing and public policy (e.g., solar energy services), successful brands with global imprints (e.g., MTN Group), and a globalizing consumer culture (e.g., migrant remittances). Africa also has many cases of policy-driven market innovations, including fintech (e.g., PayStack), healthtech (e.g., mPharma), and agtech (e.g., Hello Tractor), which often emerge amid scarcity and offer insights otherwise invisible in Western markets. Yet there is a dearth of research that tells Africa’s stories, especially in major business journals, (un)intentionally excluding an entire continent from marketing and public policy theory and practice. This commentary addresses this exclusion of Africa and argues for the mutual “interestingness value” of including more African stories, voices, research, and contributions to marketing and public policy research.

Adriana Guedes Arcuri, Jannsen Santana, Isabela Carvalho de Morais, Karin Brondino-Pompeo, Maíra Magalhães Lopes, and Luciana Velloso, “Inclusion from the Borderlands: A Border-Thinking Praxis for Reorienting Marketing Research, Education, and Practice”

Contrary to claims that inclusion-related initiatives have gone “too far,” we contend that marketing research, education, and practice still have considerable ground to cover to become genuinely inclusive. Debates about inclusion in marketing often privilege representation over transformational change. Yet, adding marginalized bodies to existing structures alone does not guarantee inclusion. For instance, casting Black actors to star in a movie or Latino celebrities to endorse brands in advertisements advances representation, but it does not dismantle the hierarchies of knowledge that have historically stereotyped and excluded such groups in the first place (Goldszal 2024). We thus problematize that dominant discourses of inclusion remain grounded in notions of belonging that require conformity to models, norms, practices, and languages that are deeply uncomfortable for, and ultimately exclusionary to, many bodies and forms of knowledge.

Todd Pezzuti, Jinjie Chen, and Mauricio Mittelman, “Beyond Representation: Inclusive Marketing as Market Access”

In recent years, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has shifted from moral aspiration to public controversy. Once seen as a marker of organizational progress, DEI initiatives are now frequently portrayed by critics as politicized and divisive. This backlash has produced hesitation across sectors: brands retreating from inclusion campaigns, universities softening DEI language, and scholars questioning whether the concept itself has become too ideological. Public support for such initiatives has fallen to 52%, a historic low, and even proponents agree that serious rethinking and resetting may be needed. Yet for marketers, inclusion is not a political ideology; it is a market necessity. Markets, at their core, are systems of access—mechanisms that enable or restrict participation. One way to reclaim inclusion as a marketing imperative is to look beyond U.S. debates and examine how inclusion is understood and practiced across cultures.

Nakeisha S. Ferguson (Lewis), Dalila Salazar Morningstar, Takisha S. Toler, and Eric Rhiney, “Beyond Compliance: Inclusion as a Credibility Signal in Higher Education Markets”

Higher education institutions (HEIs) are operating in an environment characterized by demographic change, fiscal pressure, and heightened public scrutiny regarding the value of higher education. Declining birth rates across the United States have reduced the pool of traditional college-age students, intensifying competition among institutions for enrollment. In addition to the widely discussed enrollment cliff and growing skepticism about the return on investment of a college degree, universities are under increasing pressure to demonstrate clear value to prospective stakeholders.

Broadening the Range of Groups That Deserve Additional Consideration

Carlos Velasco, Marzieh Alaei, Rishi Yildiz, and Charles Spence, “Sensory Inclusion in the Marketplace: Addressing Overload as an Emerging Axis of Exclusion”

Sensory inclusion thus represents a dimension that cross-cuts market design, affecting who can shop where, for how long, and under what conditions. Unlike socioeconomic barriers that are addressable through pricing or digital barriers that are responsive to interface redesign, sensory barriers require rethinking the perceptual architecture of marketplace environments, making sensory accessibility foundational for genuinely inclusive markets. Sensory overload occurs when cumulative sensory intensity, complexity, or incongruence exceeds an individual’s processing capacity. Unlike cognitive load or arousal, overload reflects breached perceptual regulation rather than heightened activation per se.

Nancy J. Sirianni, Kathryn Greenslade, Gamze Koseoglu, Josephine Go Jefferies, and Cinthia B. Satornino, “Neuroconvergence: An Untapped Strategy for Reducing Communication Mismatches and Enhancing Creativity in Frontline Encounters”

For customers and employees who are neurodivergent, the risk of cognitive and communication mismatches in frontline encounters is exponentially higher—and achieving neuroconvergence more challenging—due to significant differences in their cognitive profiles relative to the majority of the population. By including neurodiversity in customer experience (CX) design, firms can benefit from enhanced creativity as an outcome while mitigating the risk of unsatisfactory interactions for both customers and employees.

Cihat Erbil, Kurt April, and Mustafa F. Özbilgin, “The Compassion–Consumption Paradox in Pet Care Markets: Rethinking Inclusion in Multispecies Consumer Policy”

Paradox theory conceptualizes paradoxes as persistent and interdependent tensions between elements that are logically inconsistent yet simultaneously present and enduring within organizational and institutional systems. Pet care markets have expanded dramatically over the past two decades, reshaping how humans understand responsibility, affection, and obligation toward nonhuman companions. Yet beneath the glossy imagery of ethical consumption and responsible ownership lies a structural contradiction at the heart of contemporary pet care economies. Consumers invest emotionally and financially in the well-being of specific animals, often shaped by attachment, responsibility, or routine care practices, while the products required to maintain that care often depend on extractive, polluting, or ethically fraught supply chains that harm other species, ecosystems, and communities.

Nancy V. Wünderlich, Henna Syrjälä, Julia Rötzmeier-Keuper, David A. Fennel, and Julie Emontspool, “Beyond the Human: Animals as Facilitators and Subjects of Multispecies Inclusion”

Can—and should—marketplace inclusion extend to nonhuman animals? Research traditionally conceptualizes marketplace inclusion as a human-centered concern, focusing on fair access, participation, and representation of human consumers. Yet this approach may itself be exclusionary, as it adopts an anthropocentric focus that excludes nonhuman participants in the marketplace. However, animals play a pivotal role in markets—as consumers of products and as providers of services, including entertainment and assistance—thereby making them stakeholders who are vital to a firm’s survival and success. In this light, marketplace inclusion must broaden beyond an anthropocentric lens.

Daniel Peter Hampson, Bingjie Deng, and Zhiwei Luo, “Solo Aging and the Marketplace: Identity, Precarity, Power”

Market inclusion remains elusive for many older adults. Agentic factors limit self-expression; structural factors (e.g., stigma and marketplace structures) restrict access. Facilitating greater inclusion requires research that examines how old age intersects with other marginalized identities. We contribute by urging policymakers and marketers to focus on solo agers—individuals at the intersection of old age and another major demographic shift: rising singlehood. Defined as encompassing those who are not in a serious romantic relationship (including the never married, widowed, or divorced), singlehood—like old age—remains a stigmatized identity. Using an intersectional lens, we (1) conceptualize solo agers as a distinct social identity category, (2) examine how precarity characterizes their marketplace experiences, and (3) highlight public policy and marketing as power structures that can enhance their inclusion.

Shining a Light on Specific Regions or Subgroups and the Contextual Enablers and Barriers to Their Market Participation

Jazmin Henry, Tanuka Ghoshal, and Tonya Williams Bradford, “Assessing the Colonial Project: The Influence of Colorism in India”

Skin tone, or complexion, became a visible marker of representation in colonial projects—areas characterized by the systematic domination of indigenous people and cultures by European (British) imperialists between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Gradually, lighter complexions became associated with attractiveness and social status among subjugated individuals. Colorism is thus evident globally, such as in the United States, China, Africa, and India. In the Indian context, the preference for lighter complexions reflects internalized Eurocentric beauty norms sustained through popular culture (e.g., Bollywood songs paying homage to the “fair-skinned beauty,” matrimonial postings of individuals seeking lighter-skinned partners). Importantly, in India and other cultures, Eurocentric beauty standards continue to influence market offerings, particularly in skin care and cosmetics. Such offerings often perpetuate Eurocentric norms that may lead to discriminatory messaging and negatively impact consumer well-being.

Madhu Viswanathan, “Expanding and Enriching Marketing (and Management) Research, Education, and Practice Through Subsistence Marketplaces”

Exclusion of subsistence marketplaces means that marketing leaves out much of humanity. Inclusion through the stream of subsistence marketplaces has led to a unique bottom-up approach, demonstrating how traditional marketing is not bottom-up enough. As well, mutually enriching synergies between research, education, and practice have emerged. Lessons learned extend to inclusive marketing in general. Theoretical and substantive insights about consumers and marketplaces very different from those traditionally studied have been developed, enriching marketing theory and practice for all contexts and realizing its full potential in sustainable development.

John H. Roberts, Baljit Kaur Sidhu, Tom Smith, Martina Linnenluecke, and Lexine Solomon, “Equity, Benefits, and Mechanisms for Greater First Nations’ Economic and Policy Inclusion in Australian Society”

Australia has long faced challenges in addressing the aspirations and rights of its First Nations peoples and in leveraging their profound knowledge and skills. We explore issues of equity and justice in this ongoing process, before examining the potential benefits and mechanisms of embedding Indigenous perspectives more deeply into Australia’s marketplace and policy frameworks. By considering the cultural imperatives of diverse First Nations groups—including their enduring relationships with Country—we identify pathways toward self-determination that offer economic and cultural growth opportunities for all Australians.

Miranda Goode, June Cotte, and Kristine Beese, “Busting Barriers to Improve Women’s Wealth: A Commentary on Marketplace Financial Inclusion”

In North America, there is a serious wealth gap between men and women, with women’s retirement balances often 30% lower than men’s. This commentary contributes an analysis of representation and access as two major barriers that perpetuate this wealth gap, particularly in the areas of financial planning and investing. We use these barriers to provide a unique assessment of progress toward women’s financial inclusion and to mobilize industry–academic collaborations. We argue that addressing these barriers is critical for improving women’s financial security and identifying pathways and progress toward a more inclusive financial marketplace.

Athanasia Daskalopoulou and Lauren Gurrieri, “Brand Misogyny: The Rise of Sexism and Anti-DEI Sentiment in the Marketplace”

Inclusivity in the marketplace is often a site of ideological contestation. While there has been undeniable progress toward more diverse representation and visibility of a range of identities, genders, sexualities, and life trajectories in marketing, there is growing backlash against these efforts, driven by anti-DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) agendas and amplified by far-right and alt-right groups. This has influenced a range of brands to take both subtle and overt stances that trivialize, undermine, or challenge ideas and practices related to DEI. Specifically, when it comes to gender equity we observe three possibilities: brands are (1) relying on antifeminist ideological signaling, (2) amplifying harmful ambassadors, and (3) leveraging antiwoke backlash. We argue that these actions by brands can be conceptualized as dimensions of brand misogyny. We define “brand misogyny” as an ideological position whereby brands resist or push back against gender equity efforts, reinforcing harmful attitudes that uphold male dominance and evoke hostility, contempt, punishment, and control of women and girls.

Questioning the Foundations of Current Approaches to Inclusion

Martin Mende and Maura L. Scott, “The Prosperity Paradox: Economic Growth, Inclusion, Marketing Systems, and Institutional Trust”

This commentary reflects upon the paradox that emerges from two observations: On the one hand, a robust finding in public opinion research is that macroeconomic performance ranks among the most salient concerns for citizens and voters. Across advanced democracies, individuals consistently prioritize economic growth, employment, price stability, and material security when evaluating governments and public policy. From a marketing and public policy perspective, this prioritization is consequential: Macroeconomic conditions shape consumer confidence, perceived marketplace fairness, and trust in the institutions that govern exchange. On the other hand, a second pattern has become increasingly salient: political resistance to inclusive social and economic approaches, including immigration, labor market inclusion, and policies designed to broaden access to education, finance, or entrepreneurial opportunity. Often, such efforts are linked to economic arguments, framed as a defense of wages, consumer prices, fiscal sustainability, or social cohesion. Together, these observations suggest a paradox central to contemporary policy debates: Economic flourishing is widely desired, yet inclusion—frequently portrayed as a threat to prosperity—may in fact function as a mechanism through which prosperity, market legitimacy, and consumer trust can be generated.

Julian K. Saint Clair, Esther Uduehi, and Ronald Paul Hill, “Beyond the Sum of Our Parts: Emergent Intersectional Vulnerability Challenges Additive Models of Consumer Inclusion”

Consumer inclusion efforts are expanding as firms audit data for bias, platforms revise fairness metrics, and policymakers strengthen protections for vulnerable populations. Across these efforts, an assumption guides vulnerability identification: Risk accumulates by adding demographic traits. Race, gender, age, disability, education, and income are treated as separable categories whose effects stack. This logic is intuitive but inadequate. Consumer vulnerability does not arise in neat layers. It emerges when people collide with how systems classify, surveil, or gatekeep—harms that escape detection because they do not align with single demographic markers. They appear in gaps between categories, where risk is patterned yet statistically overlooked. This gap between how vulnerability is modeled and how it is lived has consequences for inclusion efforts.

Daiane Scaraboto, Pilar Rojas-Gaviria, and Flavia Cardoso, “Rethinking Consumer Competence for Genuine Inclusion”

As the world celebrates unprecedented advancements in medical technology, such as personalized medicine and gene editing, actors in health markets face growing pressure to ensure that these high-cost treatments are distributed in ways that are moral, fair, and inclusive. Achieving this goal requires more than expanding consumer access to treatments: Public and private stakeholders must develop a deeper understanding of the sociocultural factors that shape consumer inclusion. One such factor is consumer competence, which has been defined in literature as an individual’s ability to mobilize knowledge, skills, and resources in using products and services to accomplish their life projects.

Amelie Burgess, Sommer Kapitan, and Harriet Gray, “Why Marketing’s Inclusion Crisis Persists: The Limits of Diversity Without Intersectionality”

Marketing shapes cultural conventions regarding who belongs, who is valued, and whose lives are visible or invisible, contributing to the normalization of social hierarchies. While marketing research increasingly recognizes diversity and inclusion issues, inequality remains insufficiently addressed. Marketers often rely on unidimensional identity categories, rather than nuanced reflections of multidimensional power systems that structure lived experience. Such perspectives overlook how marketing systems, recognition, and legitimacy are constructed at intersecting social positions. Consequently, seemingly diverse marketing practices can foster inclusion for some groups while structurally excluding others. Nuanced analysis of how inclusion and exclusion are coproduced across intersectional identities is critical.

Shreyans Goenka and Sankar Sen, “The Ethical Foundation for Marketplace Inclusion”

The recent history of marketplace inclusion has been tumultuous. While many firms have, in recent years, expanded inclusive marketing efforts, these practices have increasingly become flashpoints in the culture wars raging in the United States and beyond. In response to the shifting sociopolitical headwinds in the United States, for instance, many companies are now retreating from, scaling back on, or publicly distancing themselves from inclusion-oriented initiatives due to concerns of governmental backlash and reputational risk. Notably, this retrenchment aligns closely with traditional economic thinking grounded in shareholder primacy. From this perspective, the primary moral responsibility of firms is to maximize shareholder wealth. Inclusive initiatives, such as diversity-focused advertising, targeted recruitment, or product redesigns for marginalized consumers, are often characterized as inefficient, performative, or politically motivated expenditures that divert resources from the firm’s legitimate economic purpose. According to this view, addressing social inequities is the responsibility of governments and nonprofit organizations, rendering marketplace inclusion optional and justifiable only when it produces clear financial returns. This commentary challenges this narrow instrumental framing by bringing an explicitly ethical lens to the issue of marketplace inclusion.

Assessing the Tools for Evaluating Inclusive Market Spaces and Designing Inclusive Market Offerings

Jiaqian Wang and Angela Y. Lee, “Marketplace Inclusion Across the Consumer Journey: A Five-Stage Framework”

We define marketplace inclusion as the extent to which consumers from diverse backgrounds can discover, access, afford, and consume products and services with dignity and functional satisfaction, operationalized across five measurable dimensions across different stages in the consumer journey: representational, access, economic, social, and experiential.

Eva Kipnis, Carlo Mari, Junan He, Irem Yoruk, and Nataliia Pysarenko, “Leveraging PESTEL: A Roadmap for Joint Action to Embed a Marketplace Inclusion Lens in Market Environment Analysis”

The significant positive impacts of a marketplace inclusion stance on the financial and social performance of organizations and nations as a whole are well documented. Yet, achieving this stance in practice remains a challenge. Organizations continue to largely overlook multiple consumers and communities as valued marketplace constituents in the development and execution of products, services, environments, communications, and other marketing outputs, at times even when acting with inclusive intentions. This commentary contributes a roadmap for embedding marketplace inclusion lens into PESTEL—a mnemonic depicting a foundational framework for systematic analysis of market macroenvironmental forces (Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, and Legal) that serves as a starting point of any marketing strategy development process.

Joseann Knight and Ro-Ann Smith, “Time to Refocus: Let’s Start with a Country Marketplace Disability Inclusion Scorecard”

It is high time that marketers recognize the community of persons with disabilities (PwDs) as a priority. Disability comprising speech, vision, hearing, mobility, and unseen impairments is the reality of every sixth person on Earth, representing great financial potential for marketers. Global spending power of the community of PwDs stands at U.S. $18.3 trillion, with about 20% able to afford premium goods and services. Yet, even in advanced economies with long-standing inclusion legislation (e.g., the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act), patrons who use wheelchairs are still navigating back doors to enter establishments that offer them limited engagement and satisfaction, though they are often in need of more in-store support than the average customer. From our vantage point, global retailers and service providers stand to gain tremendously from meaningful disability inclusion in their countries of interest.

Vanessa M. Patrick, Byung Cheol Lee, Seungmin Nam, Tracy Rank-Christman, and Justin Katusak, “The Limits of the Law: Reimagining Marketplace Accessibility”

Most marketing firms have relegated the responsibility for accessibility to legal departments, where compliance is often reduced to meeting minimum statutory standards with the primary goal of minimizing litigation risk. However, access is not synonymous with inclusion. This compliance-oriented approach leaves experiential and psychosocial mismatches unaddressed, leaving deeply emotional burdens on consumers that compound daily and turn consumption from a source of enjoyment into one of frustration. Such exclusion experiences also contribute to the continued rise in disability-related lawsuits each year. This commentary calls for an inclusive design–oriented approach and advances three core arguments. First, it identifies the limitations of a compliance-oriented view of accessibility and proposes that the responsibility for marketplace accessibility and inclusion must reside within the marketing function. Second, it explains why marketers—rather than lawmakers—are best positioned to lead efforts toward marketplace inclusion. Finally, it offers actionable guidance to marketers to design inclusive experiences throughout the customer journey.

Volker G. Kuppelwieser, Mark S. Rosenbaum, and Nicola Cobelli, “The Segmentation Paradox: When Marketing’s Core Logic Becomes Moral Gatekeeping”

An issue often overlooked in marketing is that segmentation logic can extend beyond resource allocation into something more consequential: the denial of access to customers who actively seek services, or the deliberate underservicing of individuals or groups that an organization has the clear capability to serve. When either form of exclusion pertains to marginalized or societally stigmatized individuals, the discourse often shifts. That is, inclusion often gets recast as optional or ideologically motivated, while exclusion is framed as a neutral technical decision. This commentary advances a straightforward yet challenging claim: When firms deny access to lawful customers they demonstrably have the capacity to serve, this is not a resource allocation decision. It reflects a judgment about moral legitimacy, dressed up in the operational language of segmentation decisions, targeting priorities, and consumer fit assessments. Marketing theory celebrates consumer difference when it enables profit. When difference involves stigmatized identities, the same organizational machinery produces exclusion instead.

Angela Y. Lee and Christie L. Nordhielm, “Making the Right Inclusion Decision: Navigating the Tensions Between Inclusion and Efficiency, Harm Prevention, and Profitability”

Inclusion is generally considered to be a positive thing, with most research focusing on the benefits of inclusion or the harms of exclusion. Extant literature conceptualizes inclusion as “ensuring that all individuals are welcome and able to participate fully in the decision making and have access to all opportunities in a system.” While targeting everyone flies in the face of strategic segmentation and targeting, the implicit assumption underlying this push is that firms have responsibilities toward fairness and welfare, and that brands should consider underrepresented or vulnerable populations as viable segments and include them in their targeting considerations. From this perspective, inclusion decisions necessitate firms navigating the tensions between inclusion and efficiency, harm prevention, and profitability.

Highlighting the Urgency of Wider Inclusion Considerations in Digital Spaces and Technologies

Shrihari Sridhar, Adithya Pattabhiramaiah, and Muzeeb Shaik, “AI for All or for the Privileged Few? Inequality Risks in Global Education”

Globally, more than 70% of children in low- and middle-income countries cannot read a simple text by age ten, a figure that worsened after the COVID-19 pandemic. At the same time, nearly one-third of schools worldwide still lack reliable internet connectivity, and in the poorest regions fewer than half of primary schools are connected at all. These disparities shape the baseline conditions into which AI-powered education systems are now being introduced. Against this backdrop, AI is often framed as an automatic equalizer, promising to leapfrog infrastructure constraints, personalizing instruction at scale, and compensating for shortages of trained teachers. This commentary argues that such optimism will be misplaced unless inclusion is deliberately designed into AI-enabled education markets.

Michael Haenlein, Barak Libai, and Céline Abecassis-Moedas, “Reclaiming Older Age Inclusion as a Marketing Imperative: The Case of AI”

Few areas have business costs of exclusion as high as those associated with neglecting older consumers. By 2050, one in four individuals in North America and Europe will be age 65 or older, and this demographic shift will also shape many other economies, particularly in East Asia and Europe. Older consumers account for a growing share of spending and remain economically consequential across many categories and life domains. Generative AI has a Janus face in this context: It can reduce age-related exclusion by lowering friction and improving decision support, yet it can also scale exclusion by steering choices and amplifying data-driven bias. Against this backdrop, AI-enabled interfaces and agents are increasingly positioned as “solutions” for accessibility and personalization. This makes it urgent to specify what they should (and should not) be allowed to do in consumer journeys. Despite these facts, marketing systems often neglect, stereotype, or misrepresent older consumers, suggesting that age inclusion is not merely a moral or social ideal but a matter of touchpoint design failures.

Carlos Diaz Ruiz, Zeynep Arsel, Erick M. Mas, and Broderick Turner, “Advertising in AI Models: How the Zero-Click Internet Threatens Free Markets and Free Speech”

Conventional search engines are currently organized as a marketplace of clicks, sending traffic through a ranked list of websites in response to user queries, reflecting not only relevance and popularity but also marketers’ explicitly labeled sponsored placements. Conversational AI is transforming this model into the “zero-click” internet, in which users spend most of their time and monetizable interactions within an AI environment that distills all information into a single conversation thread, monetized according to the priorities of the controlling corporations. This seemingly minor change has significant social implications, as corporate interests may be able to shape conversations via hidden prompts and steer users’ behaviors without the user knowing it. Whereas merging ads into AI environments may appear to be a convenient marketing tool, this commentary contends that the zero-click internet threatens free markets and consumer autonomy.

Linda Tuncay Zayer, Robert Alfonso Arias, Akon E. Ekpo, Katherine Sredl, and Jenna Drenten, “A Transformative Agenda for Digital Inclusion: Unpacking the Institutional Dynamics of Algorithmic Systems”

Advancing a transformative agenda, we examine how algorithmic systems in the digital marketplace jeopardize inclusion as a marketing imperative and undermine well-being. Algorithmic systems—defined here as the computational processes embedded in digital platforms and generative artificial intelligence—were once celebrated as engines of marketplace inclusion by enabling more meaningful connections and expanding access without human barriers and biases. In this view, social media platforms, recommendation engines, and other technologies that are scaffolded by algorithmic systems would naturally produce a more inclusive marketplace by widening participation and visibility. While the digital marketplace has indeed enabled some advances in inclusion, it has also revealed the limitations of algorithmic systems, which repeatedly demonstrate that inclusion and exclusion coexist

Bernardo Figueiredo, Torgeir Aleti, Diane Martin, Mark Buschgens, and Glen Wall, “Reclaiming Digital Inclusion as Collective Market Practice”

Digital exclusion is routinely framed as a technical or social problem of access and skills. Access and skills are necessary conditions for participation, but they are insufficient to explain how participation may be sustained or constrained within digital markets. We argue that digital inclusion is not only an individual achievement secured through access or skills but also a collective market practice shaped by market design (how services, interfaces, and rules structure participation), institutional responsiveness (how organizations respond, adapt and remain accountable), and participatory infrastructures (collective mechanisms that sustain engagement over time). When digital inclusion is reduced to devices, connectivity, or competencies alone, marketing shifts responsibility onto individuals, treating participation as a personal accomplishment and, in doing so, making exclusion appear as an individual shortcoming rather than a structural outcome.

Hai-Anh Tran, Magda Hassan, Ludovica Scalco, and Michelle Carter, “Marketplace Inclusion as a Continuum: The Role of Spatial, Institutional, and Digital Conditions”

This commentary conceptualizes marketplace inclusion as a continuum rather than a binary state, offering direct policy relevance and a more actionable basis for intervention. We operationalize this continuum through four interrelated pillars—recognition, access, fair treatment, and equitable participation. While grounded in prior literature, we extend these pillars as diagnostic markers by recognizing that they combine in heterogeneous and sometimes partial ways, shaping varying degrees of participation and influence along the continuum. We further suggest that shifts in spatial, institutional, and digital technological conditions reconfigure these pillars, thereby facilitating or constraining movement along the marketplace inclusion continuum.

Jenny van Doorn, Jana Holthöwer, and Esther Metting, “Bridging the Digital Divide: Why Inclusive Technology Is a Market Necessity and Opportunity”

Instead of freeing up resources, digital technologies insufficiently designed for inclusion perpetuate hidden costs. Inclusively designed tools, by contrast, extend limited capacity by enabling more citizens to self-serve successfully. At the same time, technology is not only a source of exclusion; it can also be an ally. When designed inclusively, digital systems can complement rather than replace human service providers, offering adaptive support and accessibility features that assist those with poor reading abilities or physical impairments. Inclusive digital design also provides market opportunities. In 2023, 44% of citizens in the European Union lacked basic digital skills, representing over 200 million potential users currently left out of most digital innovations. In addition, public–private partnerships, particularly in European health care, offer stability and reliability that make inclusive digital investments attractive. Finally, digitalized services improve efficiency in labor-constrained markets; for example, digital health care can help improve disease control, and telehealth can reduce travel time for medical consultations. This commentary advances this argument by offering a dual framing of inclusive digital design: as a market necessity that organizations can no longer afford to overlook, and as an actionable set of principles for building hybrid service systems in which digital and human elements complement rather than undermine each other.

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