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Isabelle Maignan: Department of Marketing, University of Groningen, The Netherlands,
O.C. Ferrell: Department of Marketing, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA
Despite the growing interest for corporate citizenship visible among political leaders, regulators, and many organizations (Conaboy, 1995; Jackson, 1997; Leonard, 1997; Miller, 1996), a large number of managers remain wary of committing resources to an activity which is not known to be associated with any specific market or performance gain (Berger and Kanetkar, 1995; Osterhus, 1997). Given the lack of evidence on the potential business benefits of corporate citizenship, it is surprising to observe the scarcity of marketing research on the topic. Even though an emerging stream of marketing research suggests that corporate citizenship may be an excellent strategic tool (e.g. Brown and Dacin, 1997; Drumwright, 1994; Menon and Menon, 1997), empirical evaluations of the benefits resulting from corporate citizenship remain extremely limited. Still, marketing research on corporate citizenship is called for, since one of the main tasks of marketing is to establish valuable relationships between the firm and its key stakeholders (Day, 1994; Srivastava et al., 1998). Against this backdrop, the main goal of this paper is to provide guidance for future research examining the potential of corporate citizenship as a marketing tool.
Specifically, the paper first clarifies the meaning of the corporate citizenship construct. Second, the manuscript reviews existing research suggesting that corporate citizenship may be a way to market the organization to consumers. Based on established theories, the authors then propose a conceptual framework to guide future research on the impact of corporate citizenship on consumers. Third, the paper suggests that corporate citizenship may also be an excellent tool to market the organization to its employees, and introduces a conceptual framework to direct future studies investigating the value of corporate citizenship for internal marketing.
Nature of corporate citizenship
Besides the early conceptualization of corporate social responsibility proposed by Robin and Reidenbach (1988), most of the analyses useful for understanding the nature of corporate citizenship emerged out of the management discipline. In fact, the notion of corporate citizenship has been tackled more or less directly by two streams of management research:
(1) the social performance model (e.g. Carroll, 1979; Strand, 1983; Wood, 1991); and
(2) the stakeholder management framework (e.g. Clarkson,...