P.T.M. Ingenbleek

Managing Conflicting Stakeholder Interests: An Exploratory Case Analysis of the Formulation of Corporate Social Responsibility Standards in the Netherlands

The formulation of corporate social responsibility standards must deal with conflicting interests among stakeholders. The standards formulation process occurs at the junction between market stakeholders and special interest groups, which implies that it may help increase understanding of the marketing–society relationship. Drawing on the power and urgency dimensions of stakeholder identification theory and decision process analysis, this study examines four case studies pertaining to animal welfare issues in food marketing. The standards formulation processes contain control mechanisms that solve the potential conflicts between stakeholders by constraining commercial and/or special interests. These mechanisms vary in the degree to which discussion centers on the relationship between commercial and special interests, the presence of new parties that may alter the negotiations, the stage at which special interest groups become involved in the process, and the extent to which commercial and special interests constrain each other. The findings have critical implications for how companies and their stakeholders can organize the process of formulating corporate social responsibility standards.

Relating price strategies and price‐setting practices

Purpose – This article aims to address the relationship between price strategies and price‐setting practices. The first derive from a normative tradition in the pricing literature and the latter from a descriptive tradition. Price strategies are visible in the market, whereas price‐setting practices are hidden behind the boundaries of an organization.Design/methodology/approach – The study deals with the relationship between price strategies and price‐setting practices that refer to the use of customer value, competition, and cost information. Hypotheses are tested on survey data on 95 small and medium‐sized manufacturing and service firms in The Netherlands.Findings – The results show that price strategies and price‐setting practices are related because strategies are implemented through price‐setting practices. However, some firms do not pursue any of the strategies indicated by pricing theory, some firms engage in practices for no clear strategic reasons, and some firms insufficiently engage in appropr...

From Subsistence Marketplaces Up, from General Macromarketing Theories Down: Bringing Marketing’s Contribution to Development into the Theoretical Midrange

Marketing researchers have recently begun exploring the specific context of subsistence marketplaces in developing and emerging economies using a bottom-up approach. Such literature offers an increasing number of conceptual frameworks and theoretical approaches derived from or inspired by a sound understanding of the real-life contexts of subsistence marketplaces. This article draws attention to a complementary top-down approach that begins from basic thinking on marketing’s contribution to development and, through midrange theories, eventually connects with bottom-up insights into subsistence marketplaces. The top-down approach helps create a unique theoretical midrange for development-oriented research in marketing that is complementary to other disciplines in the development debate. A bottom-up and top-down shaped theoretical midrange promises transformative interventions that can attend to the specific context at hand, while connecting with basic marketing principles on development.

The theoretical foundations of value-informed pricing in the service-dominant logic of marketing

– In the mainstream normative pricing literature, value assessment is virtually non-existent. Although the resource-based literature recognizes that pricing is a competence, value-informed pricing practices are still weakly grounded in theory. The purpose of this paper is to strengthen the theoretical grounds of such pricing practices. , – The paper applies the emerging service-dominant logic of marketing to pricing. More specifically, it apples the ten foundational premises of service-dominant logic to pricing and it places pricing in the frameworks of one of the major building blocks of service-dominant logic, namely the resource-advantage theory of competition. , – From a service-dominant perspective, price is the reward for the application of specialized knowledge and skills. Pricing is an operant resource, or competence, that assesses customer value, applies it in multi-dimensional price propositions, and implements it in processes of co-creating prices with customers. Value-informed pricing is the central pricing practice within such competences. , – Prices vary among others between “good” and “bad”, firms generate competitive advantage not only through value creation, but also through pricing. Learning is key to develop pricing competences. , – This paper is the first to ground value-informed pricing at high levels of abstraction in general marketing theory.

Do "good" food products make others look "bad"? Spin-off effects of labels for sustainable food production in the consumer perception

Purpose – The objective of this study is to examine whether sustainability labels like Fair Trade have a spin‐off effect to mainstream products in the consumer perception: do consumers perceive mainstream products and brands more negatively in the presence of a product with a sustainability label?Design/methodology/approach – Five scientific experiments were conducted to test the spin‐off effect of products with sustainability labels on evaluations of mainstream products. Experiments vary with respect to product category, label, respondents, and stimuli. Next, a focus group study was conducted to further explain the findings.Findings – The results show that a spin‐off effect of sustainability labels in the consumer perception is unlikely. None of the experiments shows a significant spin‐off effect, neither directly, nor under the conditions of quality differences between supermarkets, search behaviour of consumers, presence of competing labels, and different involvement categories. Also, a variety of diff...

Market barriers for welfare product innovations

New products that are based on higher animal welfare standards encounter several barriers on the road to market acceptance. The authors focus on the Dutch poultry sector and distinguish between retailer and consumer barriers. Retailer barriers include the powerful position of retailers, the price competition, and the price-orientation of decision-makers. At the consumer level, potential barriers are: involving the consumer in animal welfare, making him understand the welfare benefits, convincing him to try the product and delivering satisfying quality. It is crucial to understand what product attributes influence the consumer decision process, as this will involve more than just ethical aspects. A consumer-oriented development process resulting in superior product performance on multiple attributes besides ethics should help producers and industries to overcome the barriers identified.

Buyer social responsibility: a general concept and its implications for marketing management

Abstract The inclusion of sustainability concerns in consumer decision-making poses new challenges to marketing. The existing literature contains a variety of concepts and definitions that pertain to social issues in consumption but lacks an overarching conceptualisation of buyer social responsibility (BSR) that identifies its basic features. This article proposes a general BSR concept as a problem-solving consumer-decision process. It draws from the social dilemma and social issue literature streams to develop a conceptual framework on consumers’ consideration of social issues in purchase decisions, its potential consequences and boundary conditions. The article formulates propositions and elaborates on how companies, governments and non-governmental organisations can strengthen BSR and draw on it to relieve social issues and create profitable market offerings.

The Adaptability of Marketing Systems to Interventions in Developing Countries: Evidence from the Pineapple System in Benin

In general marketing theory, marketing systems are assumed to adapt to facilitate further economic development. However, such adaptability may be less obvious in the context of developing countries due to features in the social matrix of these countries. The present study explores adaptation in the Beninese pineapple marketing system in the first ten years after the introduction of the pasteurization process as a development intervention. Qualitative and quantitative insights across a broad spectrum of actors in the pineapple system reveal that adaptability to the intervention has been very slow and virtually absent at an aggregate level. These findings suggest that to make optimal use of the economic development effects of interventions, effects must be considered beyond the primary actor on which they are targeted. This may require complementary marketing interventions at different actors in the system. The marketing systems approach this study adopts seems useful to identify these key actors for complementary interventions.

Step-Change: Micro-Entrepreneurs’ Entry into the Middle-Class Market

ABSTRACT With upcoming middle classes in Africa, micro-entrepreneurs witness new opportunities that can potentially lift them out of poverty. Exploiting these opportunities requires entrepreneurs to make a ‘step-change’ away from the bottom of the pyramid to middle-class markets. This process hosts potential conflicts between informal-sector and formal-sector stakeholders as it requires both new resources and continued access to existing resources. By taking a strategic marketing perspective, this study labels and defines the phenomenon of step-change and offers an explanatory conceptual framework for it. The article draws implications for business development, the gender debate, as well as academic research.

Pastoralism, sustainability, and marketing. A review

Pastoralism is a highly traditional production system for livestock and livestock products. Under the surface of a seeming stability a variety of pressures of the modern time all seem to accumulate to put the sustainability of the pastoralist production system to the test. Population growth and growing demand for meat, put pressure on the natural resources used by pastoralists because the grazing lands that are saved from encroachment or conversion into arable lands, may be overexploited. Changing climatic conditions, such as frequent droughts, put even more pressure on the system. With so many challenges coming together, it is important to analyze whether pastoralism in itself can be considered a sustainable production system that in principle can cope with these challenges and thus deserves support from policy, or whether the pastoralist production system has fundamental misfit with today’s challenges, in the sense that it is detrimental to the world’s scarce resources. The scientific literature on pastoralism provides an important entry point to such fact finding. This article therefore analyzes 125 recent research contributions to the literature on pastoralism on their inferences as to whether pastoralism is a sustainable production system for livestock-based products. The results show substantial consensus that pastoralism is seen as a sustainable production system for livestock and livestock products (78 of the 125 studies contain sustainability inferences, of which 58 infer that the pastoral system is sustainable, while only 2 come to a negative conclusion). A total of 18 studies point however at conditional factors. The main factors that can potentially explain differences in the conclusions on whether pastoralism is sustainable pertain among others to the domain of sustainability, including abiotic and biotic factors representing the planet dimension, mobility, adaptation, indigenous knowledge, institutions and population growth as people-related factors, and economic contribution as a profit-related factor. Other factors include the ecosystem and land use types, policy instruments, constant/flexible stocking, controlled/mobile grazing, and diversification policies, as well as academic discipline, research methods and geographic focus. A quantitative test shows that consideration of adaptation, institutions and mobility are most strongly related to the sustainability inference. Such studies suggest that pastoralists that can adapt to external conditions, that are supported by effective institutions and that can exercise mobility, are more likely to behave sustainably. We argue that marketing can help to meet these conditions. Because the role of marketing has received scant attention in the context of pastoralists and because it has often been narrowly interpreted as market integration, we further explain the potential role of marketing in sustainable pastoralism. The role of marketing comes down to a strategic competence that enables pastoralists to create value for target buyers with whom they may develop economic and social relationships that can be favorable for both parties. Because it is likely to stabilize prices and generate a long-term perspective on value creation, and therefore on resource use, marketing can contribute to a pastoral system that supports people, planet, and profit.