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Toward social responsibility, not the social responsibility semblance: marketing does not need a conscience

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Abstract

For decades, much leading marketing and business ethics literature has insisted that marketers accept a social responsibility or heed a social conscience beyond the practice of profitable customer satisfaction. Professional observers apparently feel that the traditional institution of marketing generally falls short of optimal contribution to societal welfare. The following essay challenges that fashionable posture by suggesting how such criticism is misdirected. Argued is that the socially responsible marketing “conscience” orientation is naïve, superfluous, incoherent, and ultimately dysfunctional for its intended beneficiaries. This contrarian position is not entirely new, as readers will recognize, yet has been incessantly resisted in the academic and philosophical marketplace for ideas—i.e., has not enjoyed widespread scholarly adoption or market penetration. Perhaps this outcome accrues not from the idea-product itself but from its poor representation or deficient marketing. Therefore, this paper attempts to mitigate any such impediments, especially the packaging, positioning, and communication elements. The revised expository approach involves, in particular, decomposing the established social responsibility construct to spotlight its flawed nature. A possible intersection with conventional marketing ethics is also addressed, and an inventory of potential counterarguments to the paper’s view is developed and dispatched.

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Notes

  1. Conventional business terminology presents a problem here, and generally. “Public” corporation means a publicly-held or publicly-traded private firm, i.e., part of the private sector rather than government-owned (or publicly-owned in that sense), as opposed to a privately-held or “closely”-held non-publicly-traded private firm—also part of the private sector. You could not make this doubletalk up—but someone did. “Who’s on first?”

  2. The Fortune “America’s Most Admired Companies” (FAMA) project used as data source by Luo and Bhattacharya (2006) illustrates the point about true MSR. The FAMA data involve scoring of individual firms’ subjective “performance” on components of a nebulously defined, arbitrary corporate social responsibility (CSR) construct, rather than excavation of what the construct is or should be in society’s view. In other words, the component indicators are specified, but not the construct supposedly relating to them. (Other proprietary devices, the Refinitiv Enviro-Social-Governance measure and the MSCI ESG rating, also are judgmental composites of subjective factors, with data input only applying to scores on the predetermined criteria.).

    This type of procedure also exemplifies the limited overlap between a tentative MSR construct and CSR. The low degree of commonality between MSR and CSR, typically one or two items of a multi-item scale operationally, is one reason much research on CSR in allied fields, and even some in marketing which targets CSR, is of limited applicability to the present discussion (cf. Grunig, 1979; Maignan & Ferrell, 2004, p. 5; Sen & Bhattacharya, 2001).

  3. Sharfman (1996) elaborates the weakness of measures of the broader CSR construct, which itself intersects only minimally with MSR. Moreover, reported validation evidence applies to social responsibility as perceived, and by populations not representative of society as a whole, e.g., money managers and industrial executives.

  4. The exception elaborated in the first bullet of this section would also be a qualifier—i.e., the tendered guideline would not necessarily apply to marketing’s less overt “social responsibility” actions for which regulatory “permission” is more indicative of government ignorance than approval.

  5. The Scherer and Palazzo (2007) social responsibility solution essentially reduces to this: If the state is imperfect in foreseeing externality problems, then we must trust business to judge infallibly instead.

  6. Even if a society cannot arrive at a formally expressed consensus about its preference, as suggested earlier, the aggregation of its members’ atomistic preferences qualifies as its composite preference.

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Acknowledgements

The author thanks Notre Dame colleagues Bill Wilkie, John Sherry, Vamsi Kanuri, Georges Enderle, Joe Cherian, and Robert Audi for their pre-reviews.

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This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

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  1. Associate Professor of Marketing, University of Notre Dame, Mendoza College of Business, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, USA

    John F. Gaski

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Gaski, J.F. Toward social responsibility, not the social responsibility semblance: marketing does not need a conscience. AMS Rev 12, 7–24 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13162-022-00227-1

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