Toward social responsibility, not the social responsibility semblance: marketing does not need a conscience

For decades, much leading marketing and business ethics literature has insisted that marketers accept a social responsibility or heed a social conscience beyond the practice of profitable customer satisfaction. Professional observers apparently feel that the traditional institution of marketing generally falls short of optimal contribution to societal welfare. The following essay challenges that fashionable posture by suggesting how such criticism is misdirected. Argued is that the socially responsible marketing “conscience” orientation is naïve, superfluous, incoherent, and ultimately dysfunctional for its intended beneficiaries. This contrarian position is not entirely new, as readers will recognize, yet has been incessantly resisted in the academic and philosophical marketplace for ideas—i.e., has not enjoyed widespread scholarly adoption or market penetration. Perhaps this outcome accrues not from the idea-product itself but from its poor representation or deficient marketing. Therefore, this paper attempts to mitigate any such impediments, especially the packaging, positioning, and communication elements. The revised expository approach involves, in particular, decomposing the established social responsibility construct to spotlight its flawed nature. A possible intersection with conventional marketing ethics is also addressed, and an inventory of potential counterarguments to the paper’s view is developed and dispatched. © 2022, Academy of Marketing Science.