Peggy Cunningham

Social Alliances: Company/Nonprofit Collaboration

Companies are increasingly seeing corporate social responsibility as a key to long-term success and are collaborating with nonprofit organizations in various ways to establish themselves as good corporate citizens. This article delves into a promising form of company/nonprofit collaboration called social alliances, which are long-term, collaborative efforts between companies and nonprofits that are designed to achieve strategic objectives for both organizations. The characteristics, factors, and circumstances that enable or impede social alliances are examined through an investigation of 11 social alliances involving 26 organizations. Though social alliances may be fraught with problems, they can be designed, structured, nurtured, and maintained in a manner that will enable them both to contribute to solving pressing social problems and to fulfilling important strategic objectives for companies and nonprofits.

Identity, identification, and relationship through social alliances

The authors studied social alliances, a type of corporate societal marketing initiative. Their research finds that social alliances are an important means whereby employees identify more closely with their organizations while gaining a greater sense of being whole, integrated persons. Furthermore, this integration allows both organizations and their members to align their commercial identities with their moral and social identities. As organizational members struggled to resolve conflicts within their own identities, they were aided by social alliances, which in turn led them to identify more with their organizations. Unlike previous research, the findings suggest that the kind of connections referred to by the informants went well beyond the cold, rational associations described in previous research to emotional attachments that appear to be critical to organizational identification. The results also suggest that participation in social alliances may result in multiple forms of identification: intra- and interorganiza-tion identification.

How Philip Kotler has helped to shape the field of marketing

Purpose – Philip Kotler is one of the pioneers who has contributed to the broadening of academic inquiry in the field of marketing. He has had a significant role in shaping how marketing is taught to and practised by students and managers of marketing. By examining the personal and macroenvironmental influences that have come to shape his work, this paper seeks to explore how Philip Kotler has achieved such influence in the field of marketing.Design/methodology/approach – The research was driven by a desire to understand the context in which Kotler developed his work, including the personal influences on his life as well as the macroenvironmental forces within which his work has emerged. To this end, the reseaerch employed qualitative techniques to analyze a number of data sources including depth interviews with Philip Kotler and nine of his colleagues, participant observation at Kotlers 75th birthday celebration hosted by the Kellogg School, a review of marketing textbooks, and a review of relevant lite...

Stakeholder Marketing and the Organizational Field: The Role of Institutional Capital and Ideological Framing

This article adopts an institutional-based perspective to stakeholder marketing. This perspective directs attention to an organizational field level of analysis in which an organizations environment is punctuated by trigger events that prompt the assemblage of a particular mix of stakeholders. A thematic, interpretive, and longitudinal analysis of more than 2000 articles from 45 years of grocery retail trade journals reveals that the ensuing stakeholder dynamics that constitute an organizational field serve to afford or deny the marketer vital cultural, social, and economic capital. In turn, the capital possessed by or denied to the marketer influences the ideological frame the marketer may use in coming to terms with how to interact with stakeholders. Importantly, the authors find that strategic and institutional factors interpenetrate, presenting important implications for how stakeholder marketing should be understood.

Attributions of Authenticity: Employee Perceptions of Corporate Social Responsibility Programs

While recent research demonstrates that consumers are motivated to distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic and that these assessments affect their purchasing decisions and behavior, little research has examined whether the search for authenticity applies to other contexts. To address this research gap, we explored employee perceptions of authenticity with regard to their organization’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) program. Using 24 in-depth interviews, we found that assessing the authenticity of an organization’s CSR program was important for employees. Their attributions of authenticity depend on both tangible cues (sustained commitment of resources to the CSR program, and the degree of alignment between elements of the CSR program), and intangible cues (emotional engagement, an ethical core, and embeddedness). Our findings are particularly relevant to marketers given CSR is increasingly linked to brand promises and employees are the target of internal marketing campaigns about CSR programs and are pivotal to the successful implementation of these programs.

Reconciling the Paradoxical Nature of Violent Advertisements: A Thematic Analysis

Violence is an important macro-environmental force that has been increasing both in society at large and within advertising in particular. Despite the concern associated with violent content in both print and broadcast media, there is a scarcity of scholarly research or even inquiry into what constitutes violent advertising and its impact on consumer processing and attitudes. The limited research that has been conducted has largely been restricted to content analysis in which the proportion of violent ads was determined relative to all advertising. Anderson (1997), for example, found that 6.8% of advertising run during the Major League Baseball Playoffs contained violent content. The remaining literature dealing with violence in advertising can be classified into two streams: (1) explorations of advertising recall as a result of viewing advertisements with violent content, and (2) effects of advertisements with violent content on various groups (e.g., children and women).

The Complexity of Stakeholder Engagement

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) – an organization’s perceived societal responsibilities (Brown and Dacin 1997) – is an increasingly important component of corporate agendas. A critical aspect of CSR implementation is successful stakeholder engagement (Lawrence 2002), defined as “an organization’s efforts to understand and involve stakeholders and their concerns in its activities and decision-making processes” (Partridge et al. 2005, p. 6). A stakeholder is anyone who has an interest in, or who may be impacted by, an organization’s actions (Muirhead et al. 2002). Past research in this area has focused on cooperative relationships (e.g., social alliances, see Berger, Cunningham, and Drumwright 1996); empirical research is needed that explores relationships where stakeholder interests conflict. The purpose of this paper is to present preliminary findings on successful stakeholder engagement, explore success factors, and establish a future research agenda.

Reviews of books and software

This issue of reviews focuses on two topics: ethics and marketing research. Sandra Waddock provides a comprehensive review of Selling Sin: The Marketing of Socially Unacceptable Products. This book is a descriptive account of the historical development of five industries and focuses on the societal pressures faced by each as its marketing power has grown. Focusing on a particular aspect of marketing, Peggy Cunningham reviews Ethics and Manipulation in Advertising: Answering a Flawed Indictment. The book is written by someone outside marketing, providing a provocative perspective of our profession and our practices. Thomas Stafford was a busy reviewer for JAMS this issue. He contributes two reviews to the marketing research section. The first review is of Demography for Business Decision Making. The book appears to offer something for everyone. Tom then reviews SAS for Windows 95. This is one of the few software reviews we have had conducted for JAMS, and Tom provides a great user perspective of the product. The final review in this issue is by Deborah Utter. Deborah provides a comprehensive review of The Handbook for Focus Group Research. If you decide to order any of these books, tell the publisher, “I read about it in JAMS!”