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Isherwood, James Allan Donald (2008) An Exploratory Study Into Stakeholder Marketing: An Investigation Into Stakeholder Preferences With Respect To Corporate Identity and Environmental Marketing. [Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)] (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This dissertation was designed as an exploratory study into the workings of a company's stakeholders. The aim of the research was to gain an insight into a company's stakeholder preference and to establish what sort of marketing is most important to them. For the purposes of the research, two main characteristics were chosen to be investigated, a company's corporate identity and a company's environmental positioning. Obviously due to certain limitations that were placed on the dissertation, it was impossible to investigate all of a company's stakeholders preferences, so a select group of three of a company's stakeholders were chosen, these are a company's potential customers, employees and investors, arguably three of the most important.

In order to be able to test the different groups of stakeholders preferences towards certain attributes, a questionnaire was used to collect the stakeholders opinions. This questionnaire was designed using the projection technique, i.e. getting respondents to imagine that they were a member of a certain stakeholder group; whilst the participants were imagining this they were asked to rate the importance of certain attributes to them; their responses were recorded using a Likert type scale, that measured the importance of each attribute on a scale of 1- 5, with 5 being very important and 1 being very unimportant. Through use of a variety of sampling techniques, 167 completed responses were collected and able to be analysed.

Through analysis of the results, a number of conclusions could be drawn. An interesting result was obtained for the different stakeholder groups responses to how important environmental attributes are; potential employees and customers in fact rated them just above indifference whereas the potential investors counted a company's environmental positioning as important with an overall score of 3.96. A further interesting result was obtained for the analysis of a company's corporate identity; it was clear to see that a company's reputation plays an important role for both a company's potential employees and also the company's potential investors, with these groups giving reputation an overall score of 4.21 and 3.95 respectively. These differences highlight that a company's stakeholders are not all the same and do not all want the same thing from a company.

This dissertation has helped to shed some light on the fairly new concept of stakeholder marketing. The fact that each of a company's stakeholder groups are different implies the theory of stakeholder marketing is a valid one and one that requires a lot more investigation. The findings of this dissertation support a number of well renowned scholars on the fields of corporate identity, environmental marketing and stakeholder marketing. The aim of this dissertation was to offer an insight into the workings of stakeholder marketing and the preferences of a company's stakeholders; through careful and thorough investigation, this aim has been accomplished. The following is an account of all of the work that was carried out on the subject and the findings that the work has lead to.

Item Type:	Dissertation (University of Nottingham only)
Keywords:	Stakeholder Marketing
Depositing User:	EP, Services
Date Deposited:	25 Sep 2008
Last Modified:	02 Feb 2018 04:51
URI:	https://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/22080

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