EXPRESS: Responsible Research in Business and Management (RRBM) and the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing: Connected through Impact

Abstract

For 40 years, the Journal of Public Policy & Marketing (JPP&M) has provided a forum within the marketing discipline for scholarship on the impact of public policies and actions on marketers, consumers, and society. It seeks articles that offer insightful and thoughtful analyses of public policies that affect the marketing profession and the marketplace. Martin and Scott’s (2021, p. 2) editorial stresses the opportunity for JPP&M to be the journal for topics that “make a difference,” defined as “something that helps people or makes the world a better place.” This positioning situates JPP&M as an excellent outlet for articles that reflect the principles espoused by the growing emphasis in marketing academia on Responsible Research in Business and Marketing (RRBM). The seven RRBM principles are unapologetically ambitious, asking for both basic and applied contributions with sound methodologies that value multidisciplinary collaboration, stakeholder involvement, impact on numerous stakeholders, and broad dissemination (RRBM 2021). These principles overlap and intersect with the goals of JPP&M and challenge marketing researchers, educators, and practitioners to think boldly, broadly, and globally with a shared vision of inspiring, encouraging, and supporting credible, useful, and inclusive research. Together, JPP&M and RRBM seek research that can make a positive difference for consumers and stakeholders and pave the way, one article at a time, for societal well-being and a better world. Making a positive difference implies a shift to a dual focus in which corporate and marketing strategies need to consider corporate and shareholder well-being, as well as consumer, environmental, and societal impact, for the benefit of both companies and the world at large (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2013). The Transformative Consumer Research movement has embraced this focus, envisioning “Marketing as a Force for Good” (Mende and Scott 2021). Our hope is for RRBM principles to be applied more broadly beyond the TCR community to researchers in consumer behavior as well as marketing strategy. Businesses can no longer focus solely on shareholder value and profitability given the increasing consumer demand for socially responsible practices concerning employee welfare, equality, environmental impact, and community contributions. Marketing researchers must broaden their perspective to consider marketing‘s impacts on a variety of stakeholders and societal well-being. Although several marketing journals have had special issues on topics related to RRBM (e.g., Journal of Marketing’s Better Marketing for a Better World, Journal of Consumer Psychology’s Consumer Psychology for the Greater Good, Journal of Marketing Research’s Mitigation in Marketing), JPP&M has consistently published articles that embody the principles of RRBM. As such, it is not surprising that five of the articles recognized by the AMA-EBSCO-RRBMAnnual Award for Responsible Research in Marketing in its inaugural year (2019) were published in JPP&M, with two additional JPP&M articles receiving this award in 2020. Although each award-winning JPP&M article fulfills several of the RRBM principles, we highlight one principle per article in this commentary. In the inaugural year of the award, the JPP&M article by Catlin, Pechmann, and Brass (2015) was one of only two distinguished winners, and it demonstrates commitment to RRBM Principle 1: benefit both consumer welfare and business. Guided by theory on naive consumer beliefs, the researchers