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Explicating Ethical Corporate Marketing. Insights from the BP Deepwater Horizon Catastrophe: The Ethical Brand that Exploded and then Imploded

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Abstract

Ethical corporate marketing—as an organisational-wide philosophy—transcends the domains of corporate social responsibility, business ethics, stakeholder theory and corporate marketing. This being said, ethical corporate marketing represents a logical development vis-a-vis the nascent domain of corporate marketing has an explicit ethical/CSR dimension and extends stakeholder theory by taking account of an institution’s past, present and (prospective) future stakeholders. In our article, we discuss, scrutinise and elaborate the notion of ethical corporate marketing. We argue that an ethical corporate marketing positioning is a prerequisite for corporations which claim to have an authentic ethical corporate identity. Our article expands and integrates extant scholarship vis-a-vis ethical corporate identities, the sustainable entrepreneur and corporate marketing. In delineating the breadth, significance, and challenges of ethical corporate marketing we make reference to the BP Deepwater Horizon (Gulf of Mexico) catastrophe of 2010.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Brunel Business School, Brunel University, Kingston Lane, London, UB8 3PH, UK

    John M. T. Balmer

  2. School of Management and Marketing, Faculty of Commerce, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, NSW, 2522, Australia

    Shaun M. Powell

  3. Cumnock Hall, Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, 02163, USA

    Stephen A. Greyser

Authors
  1. John M. T. Balmer
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  2. Shaun M. Powell
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  3. Stephen A. Greyser
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shaun M. Powell.

Appendices

Appendices

Appendix 1

See Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
figure 1

Balmer’s 1998 corporate marketing mix. The 10 Ps of corporate marketing. NB: The 11th dimension: Promise (relating to the corporate brand) was subsequently added by Balmer (in Balmer and Greyser 2006) to accommodate the important corporate brand identity type. Source: Balmer (1998)

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Appendix 2

See Table 6.

Table 6 Explaining the 10 and 11 Ps of Balmer’s corporate marketing mix of 1998
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Appendix 3

See Fig. 2.

Fig. 2
figure 2

Balmer’s second corporate marketing mix (2001): HE2ADS2. Source: Balmer (2001)

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Appendix 4

See Table 7.

Table 7 Explaining the seven dimensions (HE2ADS2) of Balmer’s second corporate marketing mix of 2001
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Balmer, J.M.T., Powell, S.M. & Greyser, S.A. Explicating Ethical Corporate Marketing. Insights from the BP Deepwater Horizon Catastrophe: The Ethical Brand that Exploded and then Imploded. J Bus Ethics 102, 1–14 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-011-0902-1

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