| In today's competitive business environment, firms are increasingly adopting a stakeholder approach to doing business, where they seek to create value to multiple stakeholders. Interestingly, for the most part, researchers in the marketing field have been slow to respond to this trend, concentrating almost exclusively on the customer as the sole stakeholder group. To thoroughly understand how attending to the needs of multiple stakeholders influences marketing phenomena, this three-essay dissertation examines the importance of primary stakeholders (i.e., customers, employees, suppliers, shareholders, communities, and regulators) across multiple levels and focus areas.;Essay 1 examines whether a stakeholder-focused approach to developing marketing strategies is more effective than a market-driven one. A multilevel model of the relative influences of the firm, strategic group, and industry effects on firms' market performance is developed. Emphasis is placed on two sets of strategic groups derived from classical marketing strategy along with the recent marketing strategy focus on stakeholders. The model is tested using data obtained from the Kinder Lydenburg Domini Statistical Tool for Analyzing Trends in Social and Environmental Performance and Standard & Poor's Compustat North America databases, involving 1,716 firms over a four-year period. The results reveal that, in general, placing more emphasis on a broad set of stakeholders when developing marketing strategies is relatively more important for market performance than adopting a more limited, market-driven focus which concentrates on customers, employees, and suppliers, while paying comparatively less attention to shareholders, communities, and regulators.;Essay 2 studies the antecedents and consequences of a focal firm's stakeholder focus (i.e., the amount of attention, resources, and time the firm devotes to addressing the interests of multiple stakeholder groups). The conceptual model was tested with secondary data obtained from four different databases spanning the years of 2004 to 2007. The results indicate that the stakeholder focus of the focal firm's business-to-business customers, primary suppliers, and major competitors has a direct or moderated effect on the focal firm's stakeholder focus. In addition, an inverted U-shaped relationship is found between aspects of the focal firm's stakeholder focus and customer satisfaction. This implies that stakeholder management is a zero sum game -- where if the goal is to satisfy the customers, it may be achieved at the expense of other stakeholders.;Essay 3 studies the effects of organizational learning about stakeholders on the firm's responsiveness and on the extent of innovation and imitation of stakeholder practices The hypotheses were tested with data obtained from 349 marketing and supply chain executives representing the strategic business units (SBUs) of 285 firms across all economic sectors. The results indicate that four organizational learning processes (i.e., knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation, and organizational memory) have a direct effect on stakeholder-focused responsiveness. In addition, while experiential knowledge acquisition is related to innovative stakeholder practices, vicarious knowledge acquisition is related to imitative ones. |
