Marketing, Morality and the Natural Environment

Andrew Crane

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415439619
• eBook ISBN: 9781134612741
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This volume provides a new look at marketing, and in particular the move to establish ostensibly 'green' marketing. Presenting evidence from extensive case studies, these concerns are addressed through an examination of managers' and employees' understanding of the green marketing activities and processes that take part in their organisations.

1 Introduction

The practice of marketing¹ has, in its long history, never really been free for long from the critical, and reproachful, gaze of society’s moral custodians. From Christ’s attempts to drive buyers and sellers from the temple courts in Jerusalem, to the burgeoning consumer movement of the last century, marketers and their actions have continued to be attacked, abused and condemned. Many writers on marketing ethics have highlighted the lack of public trust in the advertising and sales professions (e.g. Laczniak and Murphy 1993; Assael 1995; Desmond 1998), and marketing is often argued to be perceived as the least ethical of all the business functions (Baumhart 1961; Tsalikis and Fritzsche 1989). The emergence of environmentalism has added further impetus to these criticisms, primarily by identifying marketing as the ringmaster of ever-increasing consumption, and thus firmly implicating it in the attendant problems of resource depletion, pollution, species destruction and climate change. Hence, the public antipathy for marketing seems to be little changed in the thirty-odd years since Farmer (1967) rhetorically asked: ‘Would You Want Your Daughter to Marry a Marketing Man?’ Indeed, even to the most casual observer, the moral criticisms of marketing, rather than showing any signs of abating, if anything appear to be intensifying.

At the same time of course, as a cornerstone of capitalism, marketing has also played a key role in precipitating the enormous rise in living standards and material wealth which have been a feature of many developed economies over the last two centuries. Moreover, as a source of brand identities, advertising and other promotional communications, marketing can be said to have been a chief producer of some of the twentieth century’s most powerful artefacts and icons of popular culture (see Barthes 1973). Now, with the advent of companies such as the Body Shop and Ben & Jerry’s, who promote their corporate ethics and environmental responsibilities in order to enhance market share, the interconnections between marketing and morality have become ever more complex. The moral position of marketing is thus a difficult one to establish, and as a discipline and as a profession, marketing remains both venerated and vilified.

It is not surprising then to observe that the academic study of marketing has been increasingly concerned with the subject of morality. Various different strands to the literature have emerged, in particular: societal marketing, marketing ethics, ethical consumerism and green marketing. This then is an extraordinarily rich vein of research, but as Desmond (1998) notes, this plurality of approaches represents a fragmented response, and might more accurately be discussed in terms of ‘marketings’ rather than a unified academic literature. However, each of these strands makes an important contribution to our understanding of marketing and morality, and throughout this book I shall draw on all of these in order to provide deeper understanding of this area.

My reason for not focusing on any one of these areas alone is, however, an important one, and indeed, it is this more than anything which is at the very heart of this book. I firmly believe that these parallel, and at times overlapping, projects have been rather limited in epistemological terms. I am particularly uneasy with the way in which the very idea of morality tends to be constructed within such projects as societal marketing, green marketing and the like. When it is not simply ignored, or else merely left implicit, the marketing literature usually views morality through the lens of either ethics or social responsibility, both of which tend to be used in a highly prescriptive and objective fashion. That is, there are implicit assumptions that: (i) there is a consensus regarding which marketing activities are open to moral consideration, and (ii) that ‘good’ and ‘bad’ can be in some way unilaterally applied to these activities and decisions providing the right ethical theories are invoked. In this book however, I take the position that the denotation by a social group that any given subject is ‘moral’ in nature can be seen as a process of social construction (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Phillips 1991; Parker 1997). Hence, rather than moral status being viewed as concrete and real, it should be regarded as fluid, subjective and contestable. Accordingly, for the moral dimension of marketing to be understood in any meaningful way, it is necessary to suspend any external definitions, or judgements from above, of the ethics of specific activities, and to seek instead to understand how morality is given, or denied, meaning inside the social group itself (Parker 1997). My intention therefore is not to be prescriptive about how marketing should be conducted; nor is it my intention to sit in judgement of the behaviour of marketing practitioners; rather, I am seeking to explore the morality embedded in everyday behaviours, the moral meaning applied, communicated and interpreted in relation to marketing. I aim to understand and analyse rather than judge.

This book then attempts to explore how those involved in marketing deal with morality in their work. The core thesis of the book is fashioned from extensive fieldwork that I conducted in and around a number of UK organizations between 1995 and 1997. This involved talking with senior executives, middle managers and shop floor employees about marketing, about their jobs, and about environmental issues, and attempting to identify where moral meaning played a role, and what kind of role this was. I was seeking to explore how morality was construed, experienced, felt, and communicated during the marketing process. As it happens, much of what I found related to how morality was denied meaning and expression – a phenomenon that I refer to as amoralization. In the latter part of the book, I describe this process of amoralization in considerable detail: its foundations, its context, its dynamics and its consequences. I also explore the opposite process, moralization, i.e. how moral meaning can be interjected, or put back in, to marketing. These, I might suggest, are the central themes of the book.

I imagine that some readers will already be wondering what all this has to do with the natural environment. The answer to that is simple: my investigation of moral meaning in marketing is primarily focused on one particular form of marketing, namely green marketing. What I mean by green marketing is marketing which, in one way or another, explicitly concerns or considers the natural environment.^2,3 The reasoning behind this focus on marketing and the natural environment is as follows. First, from a purely practical perspective, the need to develop empirical work appropriate for the study of moral meaning in marketing meant that the broad scope of marketing had to be reduced to a more manageable scale. Hence, I chose one specific area of marketing – green marketing – rather than all marketing phenomena. Second, I wanted an issue that was intrinsically ‘social’ in nature. That is, it had to be one that pertained to marketing’s impact on society. The environment again served this purpose well. Third, given the contemporary relevance of green marketing, and its obvious moralistic overtones, I figured that a focus here would yield empirical findings of a particularly interesting and vivid nature. And finally, given that existing theories and practices of green marketing suggested very little understanding or consensus regarding the role that morality should, could, or even does have, I felt that an important contribution to this literature could be readily made. Of course, in order to provide such a contribution, my fieldwork had to examine contemporary green marketing practice in some detail. An additional claim for the book I should like to make then is that it provides new and important empirical insights into green marketing theory.

Before proceeding further, I feel that a brief note on terminology is called for. As I have said, one of the key points of departure for this study was a posited distinction between the moral content of marketing or the moral experience of organizational members (how they think and feel about morality; how notions of morality impinge upon behaviour; how a sense of morality is recognized and expressed, etc.) and the means by which those thoughts, feelings and behaviours can be judged, and decisions reached. Over the course of the book, I shall use ‘morality’ to refer to the former, i.e. any distinction between right and wrong, good and evil, either in thought, feeling or behaviour; ‘ethics’ I shall use to refer to the latter, i.e. a moral code, or system of rules, through which judgements of right and wrong, etc. can be made. Parker (1997: 3), in a sharp criticism of the business ethics project, makes a strong case for the possibility of such a distinction:

Another way to justify this suspension of judgement about judgement is (what philosophers sometimes call) ‘descriptive’ as opposed to ‘prescriptive’ ‘Ethics’. This is also sometimes framed as morals – mores, norms, values – as opposed to ethics – codes, rules, tablets from the mountain . . . I suppose this is to ‘sociologise’ the ‘Ethical’, to draw it down from its supposed lofty place into the flow of the ordinary . . . It means refusing to accept a division of labour that distinguishes the ‘Ethical’ from the other things that people do in particular times and places . . . So if we accept this social construction of the ‘Ethical’ . . . then this effectively presses upon us a suspension of our judgement, an attempt to go beyond good and evil, a gesture at relativism in the interests of a thicker description.

This move into descriptive ethics is important for the contribution I am hoping to make with this book. It also feeds into (and draws upon) contemporary debates regarding the possibility that formalized ethical codes may actually disturb, and even corrupt, a true sense or feeling of morality (see Bauman 1989, 1993). Desmond (1998) for example has argued that the codification of ‘good’ or ‘right’ or ‘ethical’ behaviour in marketing has done little to redress its moral culpability, or to improve the already tarnished reputation of marketers.

There are however, as Parker notes, certain aspects of moral relativism⁴ implicit in the approach I wish to adopt. If I wish to avoid judgements, then I am also leaving myself open to the charge that I am therefore tolerating any particular moral behaviours, norms or codes that I observe, whatever implications they might suggest. Whilst I agree that this could potentially be problematic, it would be clearly inappropriate to engage in judgement before reaching understanding – and understanding is certainly something that is lacking at present regarding marketing, morality and the natural environment. Moreover, simply by making a ‘gesture’ at relativism, as Parker puts it, it does not mean that relativism is being wholly and unreservedly embraced. It has been necessary for me merely to acknowledge that moral norms and ethical codes other than my own exist, and that they are worthy of examination. Given the impact of marketing on society and on the natural environment, it would be extremely difficult to deny that the morality of those who work in it is indeed a critical area for investigation.

But how to approach the area in order to develop new and interesting insight? Given my doubts regarding theoretical development in this area in marketing, the approach adopted here is very much an interdisciplinary one. Obviously by identifying an area of study such as ‘marketing, morality and the natural environment’ the academic range is almost by definition beyond any single literature. The book thus spans the three literatures of marketing, business ethics and green business that are home to the main subjects under investigation. Critically, however, this is also very much a study of organizations, of their management, and of the individuals who work in them. Therefore, by the very nature of my engagement with the research area, this book also draws heavily on the organization studies and management literatures. More specifically, the introduction of environmental considerations into the marketing process is addressed in terms of issue selling (e.g. Dutton and Ashford 1993; Ashford et al. 1998) and product/policy championing (e.g. Chakrabarti 1974; Drumwright 1994). It is principally through tracing the individual and organizational sense-making activities (Weick 1995) attending the issue selling process, and the impression management activities (Gardner and Martinko 1988; Ashford et al. 1998) of green protagonists that the themes of amoralization and moralization are explored.

Aspects of organizational culture feature quite heavily here, and during the course of the book the role of culture in supporting moralization and amoralization in marketing is often returned to and elaborated on. Although there is considerable debate regarding the concept of organizational culture, it is regarded here as being concerned with a broad range of phenomena: various artefacts such as behaviours, stories, myths, symbols, language, etc.; cognitive beliefs, values, attitudes and codes; and basic, taken-for-granted assumptions (Schein 1992). These are the basic contents of the culture concept. Indeed, the phenomenon of amoralization is principally set out in the book in terms of the symbolic activity (Pfeffer 1981a), language (Watson 1994a) and narratives (Wilkins 1983) which champions use to support and facilitate the introduction and institutionalization of green marketing practices. Further organizational culture concepts, such as the shared values and beliefs of organizational members, are also explored in order to make sense of the moral dimension of marketing. Acknowledging the importance of cultural context in shaping the moral construction of greening (Drumwright 1994; Fineman 1996), the study explores moral meaning in three very diverse organizational types, namely conventional companies, social mission companies and business–NGO collaboration. These will be defined in more detail in Chapter 3, but basically these refer, respectively, to those with economic goals clearly prominent, those with social goals clearly prominent, and those involving partnership between profit-making and not-for-profit organizations.

Essentially then, culture is used here as an epistemological device with which to frame the social terrain of the organization – what Smircich (1983) identifies as a ‘culture as root metaphor’ approach. That is not to say however, that when I claimed this to be an inter-disciplinary study, I meant simply one crossing the subdisciplines which fall under the rubric of what might be more generally termed management or organizational studies. Whilst these might be the main influences on the book, the reader will no doubt also recognize influences from fields as disparate as philosophy (e.g. Baudrillard 1981, 1997), economics (e.g. Galbraith 1977), politics (e.g. Gorz 1980), cultural studies (e.g. Williamson 1978), even literature (e.g. Unsworth 1992) and film (e.g. Wall Street). All of these, and others too, have made contributions to my understanding and examination of various aspects of marketing, morality and the natural environment.

The rest of the book is set out as follows. In the next chapter, marketing is explored as a moral domain. The main concepts and theories which have been brought to bear on the study of marketing and morality are discussed and analysed. A case for more insight regarding moral meaning in marketing is developed, and the basic principles for such an investigation are introduced. In Chapter 3, I set out the philosophical perspective of the study, and the research method employed during the fieldwork. My interpretive approach is explained, the comparative case study methodology is justified, and the particular case organizations studied are introduced. Here too, I explain and justify my decision to focus the study mainly on green marketing.

In Chapters 4 to 6 I present the main results of the empirical study which forms the main basis of the book. Each chapter relates to a different organizational type, with conventional organizations, social mission companies and business–NGO collaboration being the respective subjects. Whilst the format of these chapters differs somewhat in order to explore the particular issues arising during data analysis of each case, a basic framework is used to maintain some degree of consistency. Therefore, during all of these chapters, the general approaches to green marketing in the case organizations are explained, and the relationship of green marketing with notions of social responsibility examined. The largest part of each chapter however is given over to describing the cultural dynamics of green marketing observed in the case organizations, and analysing the implications for moral meaning and for morality generally.

In Chapters 7 to 9, the findings of the study are discussed, their implications examined and conclusions reached. Chapter 7 deals specifically with green marketing as observed in the case organizations. In the first half of the chapter, the results from Chapters 4 to 6 are compared, contrasted and integrated, such that an extensive, empirically based examination of contemporary green marketing practice is presented. This is then used as a basis for exploring possible theoretical development. In the second half of the chapter, the moral dimension of green marketing as observed in the case organizations is set out. In Chapter 8, the discussion is extended to examine in detail some of the principal findings of the study, namely the phenomena of amoralization and moralization. These are described in some depth and possible explanations and consequences are explored. This discussion is then used as a basis to explore the likely implications for the management of morality in marketing. Finally, in Chapter 9, I summarize the main contributions of the book and present some conclusions regarding marketing, morality and the natural environment.

2 Marketing and morality
Perspectives and issues

Introduction

Consideration of the moral dimension of marketing has increased significantly in recent years. Areas of literature such as marketing ethics and green marketing have experienced rapid development since their emergence (or re-emergence) in the 1980s; new forms of behaviour such as ethical consumerism and ethical branding have opened up entirely new areas of literature; and various concepts and theories such as macromarketing, social marketing and the societal marketing concept have become firmly established constituents of marketing thought. It would be wrong, however, to assume that these new areas of interest represent the beginning of the marketing discipline’s consideration of morality. There is evidence of moral issues entering marketing thought for as long as marketing has existed as a distinct field in itself, and since then there have been a number of waves of interest in morality. Marketing is therefore an extraordinarily rich field in which to study morality. In this chapter, I examine the various strands of the literature. The main aims are to illustrate the diversity of this literature, its contribution to our understanding of marketing and morality, and also some of its shortcomings in this respect. My ultimate intention though is to be in position to make a case for the study of moral meaning in marketing in Chapter 3; it is after all on this that my claims for the contribution of this book principally rest.

Robin and Reidenbach (1993) have shown that there are two broad areas in which moral questions can arise in marketing. First, we have macromarketing questions, which relate to the morality of marketing as a discipline, function or process in itself. Second, we have narrower micromarketing questions, which question morality in relation to the specific actions of individual marketers, marketing organizations and marketing industries. We might therefore ask either, ‘What is morally relevant about marketing itself?’ or, ‘What is morally relevant about particular marketing practices?’. These two questions have occupied marketing scholars and various critics of marketing throughout the development of marketing thought and practice. Here, I shall discuss both, including not only the moral criticisms of marketing, but also the various lines of moral defence that have been forthcoming from marketing practitioners and academics.

Marketing as a moral subject

Although discussion of the moral standing of marketing is not overly prominent in the contemporary, mainstream marketing literature, there is a considerable history of academic debate in this area. Desmond (1998) claims that moral concerns featured at the very beginning of marketing thought. Utilizing Jones and Monieson’s (1990) historical analysis of the academic roots of marketing, he points to two US schools of economic thought in the late nineteenth century which competed for pre-eminence in charting the moral course of marketing theory. The first was a ‘reformist’ group located at the University of Wisconsin. This school maintained that marketers should principally work in the overall interests of society by aiding in the state regulation of the marketplace. In this way marketers could ensure fair play between buyers and sellers and ensure equitable distribution of goods. The second school, based at Harvard University, subscribed to a more ‘managerialist’ orientation. Informed by laissez-faire economics, the Harvard school contended that morality should be entrusted to the individual self-interest of buyers and sellers acting through the market. Marketing was hence seen as a quasi-science, primarily aimed at achieving efficiencies in distribution.

As Desmond (1998) suggests, the Harvard model has become dominant in academic marketing. There is now an accepted moral basis for marketing enshrined in the utilitarian ideology of the market-based, economic model of capitalism (Galbraith 1977; Gaski 1985; Robin and Reidenbach 1987). The role of marketing in society is assumed to be essentially a distributive one, such that consumers can find and purchase the goods that satisfy their needs and thereby increase their material satisfaction. Essentially then, marketing has traditionally been ethically justified from a consequentialist position – i.e. by facilitating the satisfaction of consumer needs, it maximizes consumer welfare. Hence, the invisible hand of the market ensures both material welfare and just distribution.

Effective functioning of this marketing system is based upon the assumed primacy of consumer demand. This is reflected in the notion of consumer sovereignty – an analogy based on the premise that the economy is ruled and directed by the customer. It is this concept which forms the underlying rationale for capitalism,¹ and hence provides an ideological basis for marketing (Smith 1990). Galbrait...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Marketing and morality: Perspectives and issues
• 3 Exploring moral meaning in green marketing
• 4 Conventional companies
• 5 Social mission companies
• 6 Business–NGO collaboration
• 7 Green marketing and morality: Evidence from three approaches
• 8 Amoralization, moralization, marketing and the natural environment
• 9 Conclusions
• Notes
• References