Laczniak and Shultz, in their recent article in the Journal of Macromarketing, provide a robust framework and a comprehensive definition of socially responsible marketing (SRM) anchored on ...macro-normative ethical perspectives. The explicit purpose of offering this framework and definition is to provide a roadmap to create a better world. Recognizing that marketing has a vital role in enabling the societal goal of achieving well-being and thriving, we offer some additional perspectives in this commentary. Essentially, we suggest how the SRM doctrine can be enriched and enlarged by explicitly aligning societal goals of eudaimonia (well-being) with marketing's moral duties and actions. To do so, we reconcile ethical ideas in Asian and Western philosophies as to how they may help us clarify the requisite SRM behavior. We also look at the developments in evolutionary psychology and developmental biology as to the proper criteria for evaluating the success of SRM behavior.
Entrepreneurs build successful businesses by taking innovative ideas from research labs to market. This article describes a pedagogical approach and its outcomes in utilizing a multi-stage, ...multi-course, and multi-semester capstone integrative project to teach entrepreneurial marketing (EM) of early-stage technologies. Herein we explain concepts and practices that enable the learning needed within STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) MBA programs to commercialize and market products and services arising from new technologies. The pedagogy follows a four-course sequence that applies strategic frameworks and tools to develop opportunity space for a patented idea, develop the idea into product options, undertake customer discovery, build marketing and sales strategies, and translate opportunities into venture planning. These lab-to-market outcomes are accomplished by applying deliberate practice-based action learning methods to build students’ knowledge bases and problem-solving process skills that increase their entrepreneurial expertise. Through learner engagement in a sequence of innovative, data-driven, analytical processes that focus on identifying, validating, and strategizing around scalable new ideas, this pedagogy enables students to learn EM skills that can be applied to different industries and companies at various stages of development but with an emphasis on early-stage technologies.
•Climate change is a formidable societal challenge that requires urgent attention.•Climate change requires collective, behavioral responses from all stakeholders.•Firms can resolve the climate change ...social dilemma through effective strategies.•The integrative taxonomy of strategic solutions helps resolve climate change issues.•Provides a research agenda for resolving the climate change social dilemma.
Climate change is a formidable societal challenge that requires urgent attention. As tackling ecological problems needs a broader perspective in which collective and behavioral responses from individuals, organizations, and social groups become central, we approach the climate change challenge as a social dilemma. Therefore, building on research on social dilemmas and associated taxonomies of solutions, we develop an integrative taxonomy of strategic solutions for the climate change social dilemma. Next, we look at the climate action recommendations of leading organizations that grew out of the League of Nations – the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, the World Bank, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Then, using our taxonomy, we systematically review management research on strategies for resolving the climate change social dilemma. Finally, we present a research agenda and discuss the implications of our findings.
Sustainability has emerged as a critical macromarketing perspective over the last five decades. Starting with the early concerns in the 1960s about the world’s finite resources that would limit ...economic growth, sustainability thinking has expanded to encompass societal issues and ecological and environmental considerations in economic and governance activities. Governments and businesses need to act in tandem to address myriad world problems associated with climate change, pollution, environmental degradation, depleting resources, and the socio-economic disparities that characterize persistent world hunger and poverty. A vital aspect of this challenge is to stop or reverse unsustainable production and consumption that have hitherto been pursued as part of market-driven business activity. Marketing, through its market-driven consumption-oriented practices, may have knowingly or unknowingly promoted these unsustainable production-consumption practices. Therefore, it needs to change its orientation from merely being responsive to consumer and market needs into a more responsible approach that drives markets for sustainable products and services and builds sustainable societies. In this paper, we review how sustainable marketing considerations have grown but not to the extent of becoming the driver of markets and business practices that meet sustainability goals. To this end, we present a framework for driving sustainable consumption through corporate marketing strategy and relevant government interventions. We highlight four strategies of corporate marketing and four types of government intervention for sustainable marketing.
Decades of intentional cultivation of consumerism, materialism, affluence, and hedonism, fueled by advertising messages, have created a consumption culture that is not sustainable anymore. In ...addition to the problems of climate change, there are also significant social costs associated with overconsumption and harmful consumption. We identify the causes of the consumption problem and why individual consumers must take responsibility to avoid harmful consumption for their own and societal well‐being. Although multi‐faceted action by governments, marketers, and civil societies is essential, a bottom‐up transformational movement is also required to drive the mindful consumption mindset. Top‐down measures of technology‐led efficient product solutions and consumer nudging strategies have had limited success compared to the rate at which the problem is compounding. Thus, we suggest four critical interventions to socialize the bottom‐up mindful consumption movement—education for transformative social learning; alternative hedonism; advertising, tv, and social media messaging; and creating an engagement forum for all like‐minded people devoted to the cause. Through socializing the bottom‐up mindful consumption movement, these interventions will encourage a cultural shift toward alternative lifestyle conceptions of well‐being, leading to increased sustainable consumption behavior and eudaimonia.
Many scholars have observed that the marketing discipline has become too fragmented and myopic, straying away from its core managerial marketing issues. To some, the complex discipline-transgressing ...phenomena are knowledge-producing, while for others, it is the discipline's problem of an identity crisis. This article argues that continuities and discontinuities of theoretical and methodological processes result from the contextual forces that continuously create new perspectives, paradigms, and schools of thought. Many traditional schools of marketing thought have either become obsolete or metamorphosized into new schools of thought. It has led to several theoretical advances that promise to develop into a general theory of marketing. However, none have grown into a full-blown integrative theory of marketing to tie in the various subdisciplines of marketing. We present an overall framework of marketing that could become the basis for developing an integrative theory of marketing with views relating to the core marketing processes and how the evolving contextual forces interactively impact them.
Trade promotions are widely practiced but sparingly researched. Retailers prefer trade promotions that provide short-term economic benefits; vendors prefer those that provide long-term, ...franchise-building benefits. This research develops and tests a model of trade promotion receptiveness by retailers, using data collected from senior executives from a broad swath of the retail industry. Both promotion satisfaction and relationship satisfaction with the vendor play important roles in trade deal receptiveness. Vendors could increase relationship satisfaction by emphasizing benevolence and enhance promotional satisfaction by improving their trade promotion management systems and processes.
Understanding the motivations of consumers to engage in relationships with marketers is important for practitioners and marketing scholars. To develop an effective theory of relationship marketing, ...it is necessary to understand what motivates consumers to reduce their available market choices and engage in a relational market behavior by patronizing the same marketer in subsequent choice situations. The present research draws on established consumer behavior literature to suggest that consumers engage in relational market behavior because of personal, social, and institutional influences. Consumers reduce their available choice and engage in relational market behavior because they want to simplify their buying and consuming tasks, simplify information processing, reduce perceived risks, and maintain cognitive consistency and a state of psychological comfort. They also engage in relational market behavior because family and social norms, peer group pressures, government mandates, religious tenets, employer influences, and marketer policies.
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