Multi-stakeholder marketing: mapping the field

As anticipated in the introductory section, stakeholder marketing can function as the theoretical antecedent to multi-stakeholder marketing, sometimes also revealing interchangeability between the two terms. In this regard, stakeholder marketing research has increasingly embedded a multi-stakeholder approach, highlighting the implementation challenges. Indeed, during the content analysis phase of our SLR, we encountered difficulties in spotting a comprehensive definition of multi-stakeholder marketing, which was expected. Instead, we either found theoretical definitions and conceptualizations of stakeholder marketing as antecedent to the multi-stakeholder approach in marketing or fragmented descriptions of characteristics of multi-stakeholder marketing as a whole discipline.

First, our analysis reveals that from 1999 to date, only 6 peer-reviewed articles have tackled the conceptualization of multi-stakeholder marketing (applications of theme 1).

Firstly, we found the study of Smith and colleagues (2010), who expressed an urgency to recognize the marketing myopia of companies who were exclusively focused on the customer rather than other stakeholders, the societal context of a business that necessitates addressing multiple stakeholders. Even though the notion of “multi-stakeholder marketing” does not appear in their article, they are the first scholars in the field of marketing to draw five propositions for practice that will help marketers correct myopia by integrating a multi-stakeholder approach into a marketing strategy (see Table 5).

Mish and Scammon (2010) broadened the marketing boundaries by describing some key characteristics of a multi-stakeholder approach in marketing. Their perspective provides a deeper insight into stakeholder networks, where the value exchange has evolved into a complex dynamic instead of a simple bilateral interaction. The tension between stakeholder interests is made explicit rather than implied, and the control over marketing activities is distributed rather than centralized.

In 2011, Hult and colleagues provided an early definition of stakeholder marketing as “activities and processes within a system of social institutions that facilitate and maintain value through exchange relationships with multiple stakeholders.” (Hult et al. 2011; p. 44). Furthermore, despite recognizing that firms develop narrow relationships by prioritizing primary stakeholders (such as customers, employees, shareholders, regulators, suppliers, and communities) over secondary stakeholders (such as special interest groups, competitors, trade associations, mass media, social media), they elaborated on the crucial concept of value creation and exchange in marketing in a broader perspective. Hence, they affirm that a wider set of stakeholders holding social and environmental claims - beyond those considered appropriate in a purely managerial perspective, such as customers - should be included in marketing value creation processes (see Smith et al. 2010).

However, their review pointed out that most marketing research had yet to adopt such an enlarged and multilateral perspective of stakeholder value creation. In particular, research claiming to adopt a stakeholder approach in marketing was, in fact, still mainly focused on value creation and exchange with customers for delivering financial benefits to firms (Freeman et al. 2010).

Then, an editorial paper published in 2011 by Hult conceptualized the notion of “market orientation plus,” advocating for an expanded perspective on marketing that encompasses the interests of multiple stakeholders and integrates sustainability principles, as also affirmed by Smith et al. (2010). Recognizing the limitations of traditional marketing approaches, which often prioritize customer satisfaction and shareholder value, Hult (2011) argued for a more comprehensive approach that extends beyond these narrow confines. He proposed “elevating market orientation efforts beyond a narrow focus on customers (and competitors, suppliers, etc.) to incorporate additional stakeholders and triple bottom line issues at the strategic level” (p. 2). This broader perspective, he contended, would enable organizations to achieve market-based sustainability, which entails aligning strategic activities with the needs and expectations of a diverse range of stakeholders while simultaneously addressing their environmental, social, and economic considerations.

In the same year, Hillebrand et al. (2015) discussed the concept of stakeholder marketing by highlighting three main characteristics: systemic and processual, and creating value for all stakeholders, not just shareholders. They introduced an emerging framework that views stakeholder networks as continuous and intertwined, contrasting the traditional view of distinct and separate entities. In their view, traditional marketing mainly focuses on the level of the individual firm or the customer (through a consumer behavior perspective, for instance). In contrast, stakeholder marketing focuses on the firm and its network of stakeholders conjointly.

The following year, Kull et al. (2016) attempted to define stakeholder marketing by leveraging the power of relationships and emphasizing their quality and interconnectedness as critical strategic assets for companies to improve their competitive advantage and financial performance. The authors advocate for exploring how multiple stakeholders are interlinked and involved in marketing processes and actions to understand value creation at the individual, group, and firm level. Finally, the study by Aksoy et al. in 2022 suggests that marketing needs to expand its focus through multiple stakeholder engagement by recognizing, supporting, and establishing long-term dialogues with multiple stakeholders simultaneously.

Table 5 reports a summary of the evolution of multi-stakeholder marketing conceptualization.

As we first delved into the subject of multi-stakeholder marketing from a stakeholder marketing conceptual background (see Hillebrand et al. 2015; Hult et al. 2011; Kull et al. 2016) it was evident that stakeholder marketing scholars called for future research that should prioritize describing, explaining, and predicting how this approach can meet the expectations of multiple stakeholders at once. This means that instead of prioritizing individual stakeholder groups and their isolated value creation, a broader multi-stakeholder approach in marketing should be directed to integrate multiple stakeholders’ interests and expectations into marketing strategies and actions and orchestrate collaborative actions that can be coordinated by the firm or led by stakeholders conjointly (Deng et al. 2017; Pirsch et al. 2013). This approach integrates normative concepts, such as ethical considerations, to impact both marketing outcomes and societal well-being, as proposed by Donaldson and Preston (1995) and Kull et al. (2016). However, we found that simultaneously co-creating value with all stakeholders in an identical manner through a corporate-focused stakeholder marketing approach is deemed to lack credibility. This perspective acknowledges the complexity of engaging multiple stakeholders simultaneously, emphasizing the need for careful contextual consideration (Smith et al. 2010; Domegan et al. 2020). So far, indeed, only a few studies in traditional marketing have remained focused on customer engagement, even though beyond a pure transactional logic (Bocken 2017; Jaakkola and Alexander 2014), while most of the studies have investigated the strategic assessment of multiple stakeholders and resources through collaborative dynamics, however in a still dyadic logic. Buyucek and colleagues (2016) identify systematic stakeholder management methods across an intervention’s selection, design, and planning phases. Pfajfar et al. (2022) support Buyucek et al. ‘s (2016) insights, positing that to maximize the quality of relationships, organizations can tailor Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities to specific stakeholders (customers and employees) rather than the society at large, aligning with relationship marketing practices. In 2011, Frow and Payne developed a five-step process to identify how key stakeholders can create value for themselves and the entire marketing system in a dyadic logic, advancing the marketing potential for value co-creation with multiple stakeholders. These perspectives include a broader range of stakeholders in the marketing value creation process; however, they overlook the opportunities that interconnectedness among internal and external stakeholder groups can generate for value (co) creation. Then, to observe how multiple stakeholders are engaged in marketing strategies, processes, and actions (sub. Q2), we adopted the multi-stakeholder engagement categorization proposed by Aksoy et al. (2022), which encompasses stakeholder recognition, stakeholder support, and stakeholder dialogue as main dimensions. First, the reviewed articles indicate that in multi-stakeholder marketing studies, stakeholder recognition involves those strategies and actions aimed at identifying key stakeholders and understanding their perceptions, concerns, and needs (Jaufenthaler 2023; Lorenzini et al. 2018; Pfajfar et al. 2022) to then incorporate their diverse perspectives into organizational learning and decision-making processes to improve stakeholder responsiveness to marketing campaigns (Domegan et al. 2020; Mena and Chabowski 2015). For example, Bell (2023) highlights the shift towards stakeholder capitalism, where firms integrate the needs and interests of a broad range of stakeholders with the aim of managing corporate reputation effectively and maximizing the quality of stakeholder relationships.

Second, the engagement through stakeholder support mainly encompasses initiatives of stakeholder empowerment based on training and marketing campaigns aimed at improving stakeholders’ knowledge and awareness of market dynamics and marketing skills to facilitate their acceptance and participation in marketing initiatives (Besana et al. 2023; Oyedele and Firat, 2019; Oteh et al. 2023; Roy and Goswami 2020). Another type of support includes engaging with local regulators to co-develop supporting mechanisms that facilitate innovations in products and services in specific industries. For instance, Ozanne et al. (2018) suggest craft housing projects in the US with political and institutional ends in mind to create commercially and socially viable housing solutions.

Eventually, engagement through stakeholder dialogue is the prevalent form of engagement addressed in traditional marketing studies, mainly through constant interactions primarily with customers and employees, thanks to digital tools (Aksoy et al. 2022). In the fields of corporate marketing and social and green marketing, we outline forms of stakeholder dialogue extended to multiple stakeholders, other than customers, to create partnerships (Bastos et al. 2022; Webb and Orr, 2021); establish formal and informal alliances (Oyedele and Firat, 2019), and; develop initiatives of value co-creation (Bürkling, 2019; Gamble et al. 2019; Mingione and Leoni 2020; Line et al., 2017) to enact social change or improve marketing impacts and community well-being simultaneously in specific industries, such as the tourism (Fang and Xiang 2023; Deng et al. 2017; Zenker et al. 2017). For instance, Bastos et al. (2022) highlight the importance of creating partnerships with various stakeholder groups, such as educational, health, and business communities, to address the complex issue of obesity. Meanwhile, Bürkling (2019) suggests multi-stakeholder cooperation in crafting digital tools and content that can enhance consumer responsibility in the fashion industry. Similarly, Macnamara (2020) highlights various corporate listening methods, tools, and technologies, such as call centers, open-ended survey comments, complaints, correspondence, and social media. These tools help companies collect feedback and perceptions from various stakeholders, which can strengthen corporate branding.

Table 6 reports a summary of the multi-stakeholder engagement strategies and actions in marketing.

Table 6 Multi-stakeholder engagement strategies and actions.

In recent years, there has been a growing call from both academics and practitioners for research that explores the evolution, applications, and impact of multi-stakeholder marketing on marketing and societal outcomes (Kull et al. 2016). To address this call, this section examines studies that explicitly detail the marketing strategies, processes, tactics (the four Ps of marketing mix), or distinct marketing segments that adopt a multi-stakeholder approach.

In this endeavor, we first consider the type of marketing segment addressed as a theoretical framework for the study under review. As mentioned earlier, corporate marketing, for instance, inherently embraces a multi-stakeholder approach, differing from traditional marketing, which focuses on profits and short-term gains (Illia and Balmer 2012) and can incur the so-called “marketing myopia” (Smith et al. 2010). Social and relationship marketing intrinsically incorporate aspects of the multi-stakeholder approach, resulting in the same beneficial condition as corporate marketing (McHugh et al. 2018).

First, referring to corporate marketing, the main applications of the multi-stakeholder approach are related to corporate branding, emphasizing the need to co-create brand values that are shared with multi-stakeholders (Bell 2023; Kovalchuk et al. 2023), integrated marketing communication (Orazi et al. 2017) and marketing intelligence processes aiming at implementing a corporate system that is not limited to monitor customer needs but a multiple stakeholder audience (Macnamara 2020; Stocker et al. 2021). Marketing outputs such as improving the market positioning (Stocker et al. 2021) and economic performance (Macnamara 2020) are the most prevalent outputs resulting from applying the multi-stakeholder approach in corporate marketing.

Second, moving to traditional marketing, the primary applications of the multi-stakeholder approach relate to different topics: product innovation (Ozanne et al. 2018; Von Der Heidt and Scott 2011); new product launching (Huempfner and Kopf 2017; Lehmann 2006); packaging (Lorenzini et al. 2018) and branding (Centeno and Wang 2017; Evans et al. 2019; Preece and Kerrigan 2015); communication in terms of messages and tools (Bürklin 2019; Fang and Xiang 2023; Oteh et al. 2023); advertising (Luyckx et al., 2024; Matear and Dacin 2010), and; placement (Moustier et al. 2010). When examining the outputs addressed, whether marketing output, societal output, or both, it becomes clear that in the case of traditional marketing, the emerging output is predominantly a marketing output. Specifically, most of the studies discuss the impact of multi-stakeholder marketing on financial performances (Gamble et al. 2019), improving competitiveness (Von Der Heidt and Scott 2011), expanding the marketplace (Lorenzini et al. 2018; Ozanne et al. 2018), and; mitigating the impact of counterfeiting in specific industries (Evans et al. 2019).

Then, we introduced the main applications of multi-stakeholder marketing in social/green marketing. From our SLR, this segment of marketing applied multi-stakeholder marketing to explain the characteristics of marketing events (Bastos et al. 2022; Bell and Blakey 2010) and communication (Acuti et al. 2023; Finkler and Higham 2020; Mesiranta et al. 2022). As expected, this is the marketing segment where societal outcomes prevail on marketing outcomes: improvement of societal and environmental well-being (Acuti et al. 2023; Hermann 2022) by reducing waste (Mesiranta et al. 2022), promoting and educating consumers healthier lifestyles (Bell and Blakey 2010; Parkinson et al. 2017; Pirsch et al. 2013), or preserving natural habitats (Finkler and Higham 2020).

Eventually, four studies elaborate on the concept of relationship marketing, positing that the main applications of multi-stakeholder marketing strategies in this field are observable in the co-development of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) initiatives since effective relationship-building with various stakeholders can lead to more effectively tailored strategies on the needs and claims of specific groups of stakeholders (Pfajfar et al. 2022). Then, in the value co-creation initiatives with multiple stakeholders such as internal human resources, students, faculty members, and other stakeholders in the higher education sector (Jain et al. 2022), customers, employees, and external stakeholders (Payne and Holt 2001), employees and volunteers in the cultural industry (Besana et al. 2023). Studies in relationship marketing outline that multi-stakeholder marketing practices can simultaneously create favorable market and societal outcomes, such as increased customer satisfaction, while improving stakeholder engagement and the perceived benefits for society.

Table 7 summarizes the applications of multi-stakeholder marketing for societal and marketing outputs.

Table 7 The applications of multi-stakeholder marketing for societal and marketing outputs.