About

Mission

Our mission is to work together on advancing knowledge on marketing ethics, ensuring relevance to business and society.

Vision

Our vision is to attract and involve academics and practitioners working on or concerned with marketing ethics from Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and abroad. In so doing, we aim to connect opinion leaders and experts capable of challenging state-of-art marketing ethics and opening the doors to new or novel perspectives. We are specifically interested in coming up with critical, breakthrough perspectives on marketing ethics, as well as in advancing the field from ontological, epistemological, and methodological points of view.   

Focal research areas

We conduct research on ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability within the discipline of marketing and oriented toward boosting the competitive advantage of organizations in an ever more saturated and interconnected marketplace. More specifically, our research topics include, but are not limited to, the following ones:

• The antecedents and consequences of customer perceptions of brand ethicality and social responsibility.
• The antecedents and consequences of cause-related purchases, sustainable consumer behavior, and sustainable brand-based innovation.
• The ethical implications and challenges of diverse brand co-creation processes such as brand identity co-creation, brand knowledge co-creation, and co-creation of brand offerings.
  The implementation of sustainability in business and consumer markets, and the role of marketing in driving commitment to sustainability.
• The impact of strategic orientations on organizational sustainability-focused innovation endeavours and performance.
• Drivers of charitable behavior, donor relationship management, and donor loyalty.
• Balance between ethics, innovation, and branding in the context of luxury retailing.
• Balance between innovation and ethics in the pharmaceutical industry.
• Alternatives to corporate social responsibility in uncertain and ambiguous times.
• Ethical implications and challenges of salespeople’s behavior.
• Ethical implications and challenges of artificial intelligence-based technology adoption in marketing and sales organizations.
• The role of marketing in boosting business model innovation for corporate sustainability.
• Dynamic capabilities as drivers of engagement in business model innovation and corporate sustainability across different organizational decision levels and processes.

Strategy

Our strategy revolves around research, education, and service, and is primarily concerned with positively contributing to business and society. The increasing relevance of ethical aspects in the current socioeconomic environment requires that companies rethink their business strategies and models, and align them with the dynamic ethical conscientiousness of diverse stakeholders. Accordingly, our strategic focus is inherently related to transformative processes with regard to research, education and service.

1. Research: We promote high-quality conceptual, qualitative, and quantitative research on ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability conducted within the discipline of marketing that is relevant to business and society. Our objective is to publish articles in AJG 3/4/4* and FT 50 journals, as well as to edit books that are relevant to academics and managers. To achieve this objective, we promote research collaboration with international scholars and companies. We organize seminars, company visits, workshops, writing retreats, and other types of research-related activities. Moreover, we actively participate in major international conferences, including the American Marketing Association Conference, the Marketing Science Conference, the European Marketing Academy Conference, the World Open Innovation Conference, the EurOMA Conference, and the DRUID Conference. In addition, we actively engage in external funding applications to enhance our research and to enable the employment of post docs and PhD students. Finally, we embrace several research dissemination initiatives via newspaper articles, TV interviews, and others.

2. Education: We engage in research- and practice-based teaching at BSc, MSc, and PhD levels. We teach topics related to ethics, corporate social responsibility, and sustainability across a plethora of programs at CBS and at other top-tier international institutions. We involve students and company managers in teaching, and foster a three-way ongoing feedback: teachers-students-managers. We develop multiple teaching materials (e.g., cases) and methods (e.g., off-campus field activities) and embrace offline, online, and blended learning formats. Finally, we actively support the exchange of PhD students, and encourage PhD students to visit CBS as part of their education.

3. Service: We are committed to the academic community on a broader level, too. We serve as editors-in-chief, associate editors, guest editors, and editorial board members of renowned international journals (e.g., Industrial Marketing Management, Business Ethics: A European Review), and as executive committee members and special interest group chairs at major international academic conferences (e.g., European Marketing Academy Conference). In addition, we engage in inter-university collaborations on research- and teaching-related topics.

In light of the above-presented three building blocks of our strategy (i.e., research, education, and service), we are currently working on the following strategic initiatives:

1. Research-related initiatives

• Organize a writing retreat (possibly with other research clusters) to work intensively on research projects.
• Sponsor a special issue in a leading international journal to boost intra-cluster collaboration, propagate our research topics, and attract new affiliated members.
• Invite international leading scholars and company managers for research seminars.
• Enhance research-related collaborations, and establish long-term relationships, with managers of local companies. 

2. Education-related initiatives

• Develop and refine a teaching portfolio aligned with our research expertise and ensure its relevance to business and society.
• Ensure that social and ethical issues are incorporated into the Department’s educational programs at both BSc and MSc levels.
• Involve more managers and work with real case companies in our classes.
• Boost online teaching initiatives and blended learning.
• Use online platforms to engage international colleagues in our teaching.
• Develop MSc electives on marketing ethics (social marketing).
• Develop a PhD course on business/marketing ethics.

3. Service-related initiatives

• Contribute to the CBS Business in Society (BiS) platform, as the topics we conduct research on (i.e., CSR, ethics, sustainability) are especially relevant to society.
• Collaborate with CBS Sustainability, as there is an overlap in research interests. Organize a joint research seminar to get to know each other and start a potential collaboration.
• Promote the cluster in the international academic community and, specifically, at prestigious international conferences (e.g., EMAC).
• Promote the cluster when attending research seminars abroad.