Multi-stakeholder marketing: mapping the field

Multi-stakeholder marketing is growing in importance, both in theory and practice. However, it still appears poorly conceptualized as an integrated discipline, and its applications are untapped. Therefore, this paper delves into such a concept by conducting a systematic literature review (SLR) to uncover how multi-stakeholder marketing has evolved, its applications for marketing and societal outcomes, and future research and practical directions. Our findings, overall, reveal a growing consensus among scholars on the importance of engaging diverse stakeholders in marketing value-creation processes, moving from narrow to interconnected relationships. We outline that most studies addressing multi-stakeholder marketing appear in the traditional marketing field rather than the corporate and/or social/green marketing segments. However, they are still dominated by an instrumental perspective that leverages multi-stakeholder engagement to serve pure marketing scopes, such as creating a competitive advantage and leaving social issues aside. While still residual, this represents an advancement in the field, and we argue that traditional marketing strategies should broaden their applications by engaging interconnected stakeholder groups that naturally open the traditional marketing boundaries to society. We provide our conceptualization of multi-stakeholder marketing, including key characteristics, based on observed best practices and arguments, which will serve as a basis to elaborate practically and theoretically in the future.