Editorial: Sense making in marketing organizations and consumer psychology: Theory and practice

Abstract Sense making includes both explicit and implicit mental processes of constructing, framing, creating, and rendering a view (e.g., an executive's mental model of “how things get done in my organization.” Related to decision making, sense making includes automatic and controlled scanning of memory and environments for framing issues. Sense making is meaning creation based on current and prior interpretations of thoughts generated from three sources: external stimuli, focused retrieval from internal memory, and seemingly random foci in working memory; such sense making is constructed on cultural pilings held unconsciously in long‐term memory. Consequently, meta‐sense‐making efforts are always incomplete; that is, all of us possess an incomplete ability to understand the process and outcomes of our own sense making. This P&M special issue includes five articles related by their focus on understanding how marketing executives and consumers go about sense making, as well as how sense‐making processes are transformed to result in new mental models of perceived realities. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.