Succeeding with Responsible Marketing a Framework and Three Short Cases

While some firms may struggle to balance corporate responsibility and strategic imperatives, other companies have incorporated responsibility in their DNA by changing perspectives. This chapter proposes an organizing framework for marketing responsibility. More specifically, it frames responsible marketing in contrast to other related marketing types. It stipulates that sustainability marketing has long reigned as state of the art in corporate responsibility but remains fraught with an instrumental perspective to responsibility, consisting of using it extrinsically to reap strategic and economic objectives (i.e., as a means to achieve profits). As such, sustainability marketing remains imprisoned in the ideological structure, which contributes precisely to environmental depletion and social pauperization for the sole purpose of spurring growth and profit. Instead, responsible marketing entails a broader shift by reshaping our views on the system, a sinequanon condition to enable responsibility and ethics to flourish genuinely. Responsibility is viewed intrinsically as an end in itself and not as a means to other questionable ends. After delineating the various components of responsible marketing and the nature of responsible marketing, the chapter presents a practice-oriented responsible marketing mix called the “4Cs,” and which replace the “4Ps.” Three case studies are then analyzed according to the 4C framework, emphasizing how responsibility might be imbued in the four critical elements of the marketing mix. A final section wraps up the chapter by discussing the role of firms in pursuing responsibility and discussing implications for the State, for consumers, and perspectives for the future.