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"The Role of Marketing in Creating Customer Value and Enhancing Societal Welfare"

The marketing function is uniquely associated with creating and delivering value to customers and in the process, it contributes positively to firm performance and increases shareholder worth. Historically, our work has demonstrated that marketing efforts lead to greater employment opportunities, income generating potential, and arguably more product alternatives and more choices within product categories. We focus on increasing the range and variety of products and services, creating opportunities to identify and promote branded and trademarked goods, aiding in the adoption and exploitation of new technologies, and exploring new markets in emerging economies. Recall Adam Smith, who opined that consumption was the sole purpose of production! Today, there is a growing chorus of voices normatively arguing that marketing can and must do more to bolster individual customer value and societal welfare. Some marketing scholars have introduced the concept of stakeholder marketing and proposed that marketing can be an agent of change to enhance societal welfare. Others have spoken of and undertaken transformative consumer research that seeks to benefit consumer welfare and quality of life of consumers around the world.

For marketing scholars and practitioners alike, the challenge is to consider marketing efforts with an eye to creating customer value, while simultaneously enhancing societal welfare. Marketing scholars can play a special play in understanding how to consider the aforementioned issues and examine them from a perspective that acknowledges the importance to the firm, but also to customers and society at large. We need to think about and examine how firms can serve underprivileged segments, and yet remain viable; how marketers can embrace new digital technologies for commercial purposes, and yet respect the privacy of consumers; how firms can develop more environmentally responsible product and service offerings, and how advertisers can create messages that low literacy consumers can understand. These are but a few of the myriad opportunities that are worthy of attention. We raise these issues in the hope to spur discussion and more research, and propose the theme for the 2010 American Marketing Association Summer Educators' Conference to be "The Role of Marketing in Creating Customer Value and Enhancing Societal Welfare."