MULTI-STAKEHOLDER APPROACH: CONCEPTUALIZATION, EVOLUTION, STRATEGIC AND TACTICAL APPLICATIONS IN MARKETING

This dissertation investigates how a multi-stakeholder orientation can move from a broad relational principle to a concrete managerial logic, and ultimately reframe marketing as a function able to create economic and societal value in the long term. Grounded in stakeholder theory and in the debate on responsible marketing, the thesis starts from a persistent problem: marketing is still frequently perceived as manipulative, short-term oriented, and detached from societal expectations. To address this legitimacy gap, the research develops a four-study program that clarifies the meaning of the Multi-Stakeholder Approach (MSA), conceptualizes Multi-Stakeholder Marketing (MSM), shows how it can be operationalized in day-to-day decisions, and tests whether this transformation is also visible in firms’ public signals. The dissertation adopts a sequential multi-method design that combines ethnography, systematic review, qualitative interviews, and mixed-methods advertising analysis. Study I is an ethnographic, multi-source qualitative inquiry into a corporate social innovation project in the coffee supply chain in the Dominican Republic. It shows that MSA generates enduring effects when knowledge transfer, stakeholder empowerment, engagement, and cross-functional collaboration activate autonomous social innovation, ecosystem learning, and resilience beyond the original project boundaries. Study II is a systematic literature review of 74 articles and provides the first integrated systematization of MSM as a research field. It reconstructs its evolution, identifies key processes, applications, and impacts, and proposes a working definition of MSM. At the same time, it reveals a dominant instrumental bias in the literature and a major empirical gap: the lack of cumulative evidence on how firms actually implement MSM in practice. Study III addresses this gap through 45 in-depth interviews with CEOs, CMOs, and marketing and communication leaders from multinational companies and SMEs. The findings show how MSM reshapes the 7Ps of the marketing mix: products become more inclusive and ethically sourced; pricing incorporates fairness and transparency; place emphasizes traceability and accessibility; promotion shifts from persuasion to education; people, processes, and physical evidence become vehicles of dialogue, coherence, and accountability. Four enabling drivers also emerge: a purpose-driven mindset, active stakeholder dialogue, innovationoriented leadership, and cross-functional integration. Finally, Study IV examines whether these changes are reflected in advertising. Through a mixed-methods design combining Delphi, content analysis, and Apriori algorithm analysis on 258 international campaigns by 86 multinational enterprises across 2016, 2019, and 2022, the study identifies a clear evolution from product-centric narratives to stakeholder-rich narratives and three recurring trajectories of advertising transformation: unimodal, bimodal, and multimodal. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that marketing can regain legitimacy when it is no longer treated as a purely persuasive device, but as a relational infrastructure connecting firms, stakeholders, and society. The main contribution lies in closing the loop between approach, function, practice, and signals, and in offering a final framework that links enabling conditions, the 7Ps, accountability mechanisms, claim-practice coherence, and threats to implementation. By doing so, the dissertation advances the conceptual boundaries of marketing, provides an operational definition of MSM, and offers theoretical and managerial guidance for designing more responsible, coherent, assessable, and long-term marketing strategies. It also opens a research agenda on metrics, maturity, and the alignment between internal practices and external communication