Public Policy & Marketing

Stigmas, or discredited personal attributes, emanate from social perceptions of physical characteristics, aspects of character, and “tribal” associations (e.g., race; Goffman 1963 ). Extant research has emphasized the perspective of the stigma target, with some scholars exploring how social institutions shape stigma. Yet the ways stakeholders within the sociocommercial sphere create, perpetuate, or resist stigma remain overlooked. The authors introduce and define marketplace stigma as the labeling, stereotyping, and devaluation by and of commercial stakeholders (consumers, companies and their employees, stockholders, and institutions) and their offerings (products, services, and experiences). The authors offer the Stigma Turbine as a unifying conceptual framework that locates marketplace stigma within the broader sociocultural context and illuminates its relationship to forces that exacerbate or blunt stigma. In unpacking the Stigma Turbine, the authors reveal the critical role that...

Research in marketing includes many examples of consumers helping other consumers. However, most research has studied helping behavior from the recipients' perspective by examining the use of personal sources of information. Consequently, very little is known about the prevalence of market helping or why market helpers provide assistance. The authors examine the incidence of a variety of everyday market helping activities and identify a few key antecedents of market helping behavior The results of a study of 302 heads of ...

Businesses and consumers frequently exploit differences in laws and policies across jurisdictions to circumvent local laws, regulations, or restrictions. This practice, known as regulatory arbitrage, can have negative consequences for both business and social welfare. Although previous research examines regulatory arbitrage in specific contexts such as financial markets and the pharmaceutical industry, a general framework remains missing. Drawing on marketing systems theory, this study proposes a conceptualization that reflects the necessary conditions for regulatory arbitrage to occur across a variety of contexts. It also derives a typology of strategies to prevent and eliminate regulatory arbitrage. Using the context of alcohol policy in Finland as an illustrative example, the study applies the conceptualization to examine a situation where regulatory arbitrage has repeatedly threatened local policy. The findings illustrate how the broader perspective offered by marketing systems theory can help to more accurately predict whether businesses and consumers will pursue regulatory arbitrage in a given situation, and to select appropriate strategies for preventing and eliminating regulatory arbitrage in situations where it has negative consequences.

The social justice paradigm, developed in philosophy by John Rawls and others, reaches limits when confronted with diverse populations, unsound governments, and global markets. Its parameters are further limited by a traditional utilitarian approach to both industrial actors and consumer behaviors. Finally, by focusing too exclusively on poverty, as manifested in insufficient incomes or resources, the paradigm overlooks the oppressive role that gender, race, and religious prejudice play in keeping the poor subordinated. The authors suggest three ways in which marketing researchers could bring their unique expertise to the question of social justice in a global economy: by (1) reinventing the theoretical foundation laid down by thinkers such as Rawls, (2) documenting and evaluating emergent “feasible fixes” to achieve justice (e.g., the global resource dividend, cause-related marketing, Fair Trade, philanthrocapitalism), and (3) exploring the parameters of the consumption basket that...