The paper of the same title by N. Craig Smith, Guido Palazzo, and C. B. Bhattacharya (2010) goes upstream and downstream of the global supply chain with the focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR), producer and consumer activities. The argument developed in the article draws attention to the negative effects consumption and stakeholders’ decisions can cause. The latter is considered as a harmful and insufficiently studied marketing concept since business ethics has been mainly concentrated on the part of the producer: both impacting negatively the downstream sections of the supply chain and consumer decision-making practices. The assumption behind the paper is that modern consumption has become not as ethical and responsible as production in recent years and an extensive research into marketing has to be undertaken to ensure that a new type of a responsible and loyal consumer can be “brought up” by marketing communication strategies.
The article “Marketing’s Consequences: Stakeholder Marketing and Supply Chain Corporate Social Responsibility Issues” (Smith et al., 2010) provides a valuable excurse into the theoretical and practically implemented business ethics concepts. The reference point is the notion of marketing and its negative effects. This presupposes harm done to consumers. Then the authors proceed to the upstream movement along the supply chain: from consumption to producer/brand. They argue that the “harm-doing by consumers, [where] marketing is positioned as the crucial link between problematic environmental and social conditions in the supply chain and consumer decisions” (p. 618) is a burning issue for a modern CSR and marketing research. Thus, the authors present two marketing discourses: 1) traditional where norms of ethics are mainly applied to analyze producer’s and marketer’s activities and 2) new where consumer behavior (urge for satisfaction of self-definitional needs, identification with brands, brand loyalty) can be not as ethical as environmentally and socially conscious as it is expected (see Dahlén et. al., 2009). The main orientation in the paper is that discourse of marketing and business ethics is differentiated into traditional and modern, i.e. into ethics and responsibility of products and production and of brands and consumption.
The paper goes first upstream the supply chain and explains the causes and consequences of harm and ethical issues in the direction from company to its suppliers, from producers and marketers to consumers. The opposite movement along the supply chain is presented from the perspective of CSR as marketing strategy and consumer backlash. However, the central point of the paper is not the sum of upstream and downstream influences of marketing strategies onto supply chain, but rather stakeholder behavior and decisions impacting chain’s functionality.
To conclude, the authors intend to declare a turning point in the marketing studies. They state that there is a shift from customer-focused and firm-oriented marketing to stakeholder-oriented marketing where society and its benefits become key objectives not only for producers and marketers, but also for consumers themselves. The discovery of the “Marketing’s Consequences: Stakeholder Marketing and Supply Chain Corporate Social Responsibility Issues” can be regarded the statement that responsible …