Stakeholder Marketing: Theoretical Foundations and Consequences for Marketing Capabilities

摘要

Stakeholder marketing is defined as "activities within a system of social institutions and processes for facilitating and maintaining value through exchange relationships with multiple stakeholders" (Hult et al. 2011, p. 57). It focuses on co-creation in network relationships rather than dyadic relationships and acknowledges the potential of indirect creation of value (Frow and Payne 2011; Hult et al. 2011). Stakeholder marketing recognizes that any individual stakeholder relationships may be influenced by relationships with other stakeholders and that the whole network of stakeholders creates value (Gummesson 2008). However, most literature has a employed a 'hub-and-spokes' perspective when taking stakeholders into account, in which an organization ('the hub') maintains dyadic relationships with separate stakeholder groups ('the spokes'). The traditional hub-and-spokes approach does not fully reflect the problems that marketing managers experience in a complex environment of interrelated stakeholders. This conceptual paper deals with the question how the theoretical foundations of stakeholder marketing are different from traditional marketing . We present a revised theoretical perspective on the marketing discipline and contrast it with the prevailing perspective on marketing and show why the revised perspective better fits the current reality.