Marketing's Consequences: Stakeholder Marketing and Supply Chain Corporate Social Responsibility Issues

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Marketing's Consequences: Stakeholder Marketing and Supply Chain Corporate Social Responsibility Issues ^. Craig Smith, Guido Palazzo, and C. B. Bhattacharya ABSTRACT: While considerable attention has been given to the harm done to consumers by marketing, less attention has been given to the harm done by consumers as an indirect effect of marketing activities, particularly in regard to supply chains. The recent development of dramatically expanded global supply chains has resulted in social and environmental problems upstream that are attributable at least in part to downstream marketers and consumers. Marketers have responded mainly by using corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication to counter the critique of CSK practice, but these claims of ethical corporate behavior often lack credibility and can result in a backlash against brands. The article argues that more adequate attention to the harmful upstream effects of downstream marketing and consumption decisions requires greater attention to stakeholder marketing and marketer efforts to help create responsible consumers. It concludes by identifying implications for further research in this important emergent area of marketing ethics. M ARKETING IS AN ESSENTIAL FEATURE of market society. As Brenkert (2008) observes, it is how we get our food, clothes, and the items we use every day, as well as somewhere to live and more exotic products and services, and thus warrants the attention of ethicists if only because it plays such a large part in most people's lives. In meeting consumer needs, marketing provides immense benefits, but it also contributes directly or indirectly to a variety of problematic outcomes. Marketing activities have long attracted the interest of business ethicists. As Farmer (1967: 1) has observed: "For the past 6,000 years the field of marketing has been thought of as made up of

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