Coordinating Individual and System Change in the Marketing System: The TISI Framework for a Circular Plastics Economy

Single-use plastics (SUPs) remain a major obstacle to a circular plastics economy. Interventions to reduce them have typically pursued either system-level (S-level) measures or individual-level (I-level) behaviour change campaigns, and participatory work has tended to engage consumers or stakeholders at only one of these levels. Building on macromarketing's systems perspective and on macro-social marketing, we develop the Theory-Individual-System-Intervention (TISI) framework, which specifies how marketing can use consumer insight, organised through the COM-B model, to coordinate change across the micro, meso and macro levels of the plastics marketing system. The framework distinguishes consumers’ market role at the I-level (purchase, use, return and refill) from their citizen role at the S-level (acceptance, perceived fairness, willingness to comply and collective support). We validate its four steps empirically with SUP milk packaging in New Zealand, drawing on 20 consumer interviews and a best-worst scaling survey of 400 consumers. Most barriers consumers reported were opportunity constraints rooted in the marketing system, and respondents preferred incentives and regulation to information-only approaches. The study offers macromarketing an operational account of how marketing can sequence consumer-informed action across levels, and offers practitioners a route to SUP reduction that does not place the burden on consumers alone.