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Executive Summary
Product diversion is a serious concern for marketers, especially for marketers of potentially dangerous products, such as tobacco, alcohol, firearms, and pharmaceuticals. These products may be sought and obtained by consumers occupying illegal markets or intent on using them for illegal purposes, leading to adverse consequences for other consumers, marketers, and society at-large. Drawing on established marketing principles and accepted methods of forensic research, this article reports on a large-scale study of the diversion of handguns in the United States and the countermarketing and demarketing efforts of firearm marketers to safeguard against its occurrence through their distribution systems. The findings suggest that (1) significant diversion of handguns to illegal markets occurred in the United States during a recent period, (2) industry marketers varied widely in their use of safeguards against this diversion but, on average, engaged in few countermarketing and demarketing measures, and (3) the safeguarding efforts engaged in were found to reduce both diversion and its resultant crimes. The study and its findings provide an understanding of the nature and effects of firearm diversion and the use of countermarketing and demarketing safeguards to reduce its occurrence. The study also demonstrates the use of data and data collection methodologies from the legal process to inform questions about marketing, including controversial aspects of its practice. Overall, the research adds to extant thinking about countermarketing and demarketing as well as the related areas of social marketing, corporate responsibility, and public health.

Biography
Gregory T. Gundlach is the Coggin Distinguished Professor of Marketing in the Department of Marketing and Logistic at the University of North Florida and Senior Research Fellow at the American Antitrust Institute in Washington, DC. Before coming to the University of North Florida, Professor Gundlach was the John Berry, Sr. Professor of Business at the University of Notre Dame, where he was a faculty member since 1987. Professor Gundlach’s research interests focus on marketing and business relationships and practices, with particular emphasis on how such associations are managed, their performance, and the nature of business and public policy implications that may result. He has coauthored two books on marketing’s interplay with society, and his research has appeared in numerous academic publications in marketing and related fields of public policy.

Kevin D. Bradford is Professor of Marketing in the Marketing Department at the University of Notre Dame. He conducts research on developing an understanding of significant issues within the marketing system and its relationship to society. This system can be viewed as consisting of three sets of actors—marketers, customers, and public policy makers. To this point, his work has centered on all three—the marketing domain (e.g., salespeople and the development of relationships), the customer domain (e.g., buyer–seller relationships), and public policy domain (e.g., firearm diversion). Kevin received an Excellence in Sales Scholarship Award from the American Marketing Association’s special interest group supporting research in the selling and sales management. He also received the honorable mention award for the Best Paper Contributing to Theory and Practice to Retail Marketing. Kevin received his BA from the University of Northern Iowa, his MBA from the University of Notre Dame, and his PhD from the University of Florida.

William L. Wilkie is Nathe Professor of Marketing at the University of Notre Dame. His research centers on marketing in society and consumer behavior. Professor Wilkie has received the American Marketing Association’s highest recognition, the Distinguished Marketing Educator Award. At Notre Dame, he has received a special President’s Award and the BP/Amoco Outstanding Professor Award, voted by the graduating seniors. He has served as president of the Association for Consumer Research and on the editorial boards of Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of Consumer Research, and Journal of Public Policy & Marketing. One of his articles has been named a Citation Classic in the Social Sciences by the Institute for Scientific Information. He has also served on the faculties at Purdue, Harvard, and Florida; as an in-house consultant at the Federal Trade Commission; and as research professor at the Marketing Science Institute. His undergraduate degree is from Notre Dame and graduate degrees are from Stanford University.

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