The Role Of Corporate Social Responsibility In Marketing

Introduction
Marketing has customarily focused on developing and improving means to assess and act on customers’ needs as well as anticipate and respond to competitors’ actions. This culture, limited in its scope, fails to realise how the effects of marketing activities go beyond current customers and competitors to bear on future consumers as well as society (Ferrel et al., 2010). While the norm has been organisations seeking to maximize profits with marketing activities necessarily feeding into that firm-centric objective to remain relevant, this disregard for other actors who have the potential to influence or be influenced by firms’ actions has lately been challenged and there is consensus that a paradigm shift is in order (Bhattacharya,

For firms operating in competitive market environments, sustainability has come to be of strategic importance, and the driver behind the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Luo and Bhattacharya, 2006). By dedicating effort towards cause marketing, “companies act on the premise that CSR is not merely the ‘right thing to do’ but also ‘the smart thing to do’” (Smith 2003, p. 52 in Luo and Bhattacharya, 2006,

Satisfied customers have been found to exhibit greater loyalty, speak well of their providers and are willing to pay premium prices, all factors necessary in increasing a firm’s market value (Luo and Bhattacharya, 2006). The need to go beyond the marketing mix in order to derive competitive advantage is realised with CSR increasingly the source of competitive advantage, positively influencing firm reputation which is critical in generating value for organisations (Du & Sen, 2016; Pancheva-Michelotti & Michelotti, 2010). While there seems to be concurrence that CSR provides an interface for value exchange amongst stakeholders, Peloza and Shang (2011) note how the business case for CSR in organisations would be better made if research shifted focus from the “when” to “how” CSR facilitates value exchange