Overview

The Stakeholder Marketing Consortium, a joint project of the Aspen Institute’s Business and Society Program and Boston University, is a forum for innovative research and collaboration among leading marketing scholars and practitioners. The consortium is designed to generate new research that looks beyond customers as the target of marketing activities and firms as the primary intended beneficiary. Consortium members will consider long-standing marketing questions placed within a much broader context – re‑examining the customer relationship – and also looking at the impacts of marketing activities on a host of other actors – i.e. employees, regulators, investors, and society-at-large.

The focus of the Consortium is not to look at corporate social responsibility initiatives, as traditionally defined, and consider what impact they have on business performance. Rather the focus is to demonstrate by example that adopting a stakeholder perspective gives birth to a host of interesting research questions that are relevant to the broader academic community. The Aspen Institute and Boston University envision the Consortium as a multi-year endeavor that will generate and support new scholarship on these questions.

The Consortium’s second, invitation-only, convening - Stakeholder Marketing: Beyond the 4P’s and the Customer - will be chaired by C.B. Bhattacharya, Professor of Marketing at the Boston University School of Management. The 2008 conference will be hosted by Boston University School of Management on October 2-3, 2008 in Boston, MA.