Correspondence: Pierre Berthon, McCallum School of Business, Bentley College, Waltham 02452, USA. Tel: +1 781 891 3189; Fax: + 1 781 788 6456; E-mail: PBerthon@Bentley.edu

¹holds the Clifford F Youse Chair of Marketing at Bentley College. Professor Berthon has held academic positions at Columbia University in the US, Henley Management College, Cardiff University and University of Bath in the UK. His research is eclectic appearing in journals such as Sloan Management Review, California Management Review, Information Systems Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Research, Journal of International Marketing, Technological Business Horizons, Journal of Interactive Marketing, Journal of Information Technology, Journal of Business Ethics and others.

²is a PhD student at Bentley College. She holds a BA in International Relations and an MBA from Bilkent University in Turkey, and has studied at the University of Texas at Austin and Temple University. Before pursuing an academic path, she worked in marketing and recruitment. Ekin has a variety of research interests, mainly in the areas of advertising strategy and consumer behaviour, including internet marketing, customisation, effects of the new media and online communities.

³is an academic evangelism manager for Microsoft and joins the Bentley PhD programme in the Fall of 2008. He holds MS and BS degrees in Industrial and Management Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Philip was founder and CTO of Ereo, an image retrieval search company; he also worked as Chief Scientist for Excite@Home and led the security group at the W3C. In the Peace Corps, he served in Uzbekistan, where he lectured, establishing a micro-lending programme, and installed part of the country's email infrastructure. His research interests lie in the areas of conscious capitalism and social entrepreneurship.

Received 16 April 2008; Revised 16 April 2008; Published online 3 June 2008.

Abstract

We all remember Prometheus (forethought, projection), but he makes little sense without his counterpart and brother Epimetheus (afterthought, reflection). Our stance towards biotechnology has all too often been compared with Frankenstein's handling of the creature he gave life to. Indeed it is no coincidence that Mary Shelley's book Frankenstein was subtitled 'The Modern Prometheus'. Marketers, like scientists, have tended to project their vision of a technology's interaction with society and the natural world – and time and time again the hiatus between vision and reality has manifest as a yawing fissure. In this paper, we take an Epimethian approach to the interaction of biotechnology and the market; specifically, we reflect upon the intentional and emergent trajectories that biotechnology can trace within the marketplace using a model developed by Berthon et al. We argue that such reflections can help scientists and marketers better understand the complex dynamics of biotechnology and the market: we remember Epimetheus to ameliorate our Promethean suffering.