Effective internal marketing must be matched by a strong sense of social responsibility. Companies need to evaluate whether they are truly practicing ethical and socially responsible marketing. Several forces are driving companies to practice a higher level of corporate social responsibility: rising customer expectations, changing employee expectations, government legislation and pressure, investor interest in social criteria, and changing business procurement practices.
The societal marketing concept holds that the organization’s task is to determine the needs, wants, and interests of target markets and to deliver the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors in a way that preserves or enhances the consumer’s and the society’s well-being. The societal marketing concept calls upon marketers to build social and ethical considerations into their marketing practices. They must balance and juggle the often conflicting criteria of company profits, consumer want satisfaction, and public interest.
New Corporate Concept
The societal marketing concept is an enlightened marketing concept that holds that a company should make good marketing decisions by considering consumers’ wants, the company’s requirements, and society’s long-term interests. It is closely linked with the principles of corporate social responsibility and of sustainable development. The concept has an emphasis on social responsibility and suggests that for a company to only focus on exchange relationship with customers might not be suitable in order to sustain long term success. Rather, marketing strategy should deliver value to customers in a way that maintains or improves both the consumer’s and the society’s well-being. Most companies recognize that socially responsible activities improve their image among customers, stockholders, the financial community, and other relevant publics. Ethical and socially responsible practices are simply good business, resulting not only in favorable image, but ultimately in increased sales.
Cause-related marketing is marketing that links the firm’s contributions to a designated cause to customers’ engaging directly or indirectly in revenue-producing transactions with the firm. Cause marketing has also been called a part of corporate societal marketing (CSM) which Drumwright and Murphy define as marketing efforts “that have at least one non-economic objective related to social welfare and use the resources of the company and/or of its partners.” A successful cause marketing program can produce a number of benefits: improving social welfare; creating differentiated brand positioning; building strong consumer bonds; enhancing the company’s public image with government officials and other decision makers; creating a reservoir of goodwill; boosting internal morale and galvanizing employees; and driving sales.
By humanizing the firm, consumers may develop a strong, unique bond with the firm that transcends normal marketplace transactions. Some of the specific means by which cause marketing programs can build brand equity with consumers include:
- building brand awareness,
- enhancing brand image,
- establishing brand credibility,
- evoking brand feelings,
- creating a sense of brand community, and
- eliciting brand engagement.
The danger, however, is that the promotional efforts behind a cause-related marketing program could backfire if cynical consumers question the link between the product and the cause and see the firm as being self-serving and exploitative.
Social responsibility as the Key of Success
Legal behavior. Society must use the law to define, as clearly as possible, those practices that are illegal, antisocial, or anticompetitive. Organizations must ensure that every employee knows and observes any relevant laws.
Ethical behavior. Companies must adopt and disseminate a written code of ethics, build a company tradition of ethical behavior, and hold its people fully responsible for observing ethical and legal guidelines. (A 1999 poll by Environics International, a public opinion research firm, found that 67 percent of North Americans are willing to buy or boycott products on ethical grounds).
Social responsibility behavior. Individual marketers must practice a “social conscience” in specific dealings with customers and stakeholders. (Increasingly, people say that they want information about a company’s record on social and environmental responsibility to help decide which companies to buy from, invest in, and work for).
(Deciding how to communicate corporate attitudes and behaviors toward social responsibility can be difficult).
Conclusion
New strategies and branding exercise that care of the development of the society gives awareness to the consumers that they concern about sustainability. With this strategy, the internal and external stakeholders are motivated and create the sustainability strategies at the long run.