Reactions to Customer Compliance Businesses

Social accountability and ethics seem to be two concepts which figure prominently on the radar of most companies these days. Practitioners are often warned that failure on the part of businesses to recognise the significance of accountability and meet ethical requirements would generate adverse media coverage and customer backlash. This gradual though dramatic change in expectations towards private-sector businesses has been at times attributed to consumers’ sensitisation to controversial issues, ethical standards of corporate behaviour and growing reports of private sector abuses. One does not need to carry out extensive search on news items or analyses articles to come across stories about ‘irresponsible managers’ and ‘greedy bankers’ – a rather fashionable topic, following the credit crunch which started in the USA in 2008 and spread to the rest of the world. Just as ‘ethics’, ‘social responsibility’ and ‘stakeholder management’, notions of ‘word of mouth’ (and ‘word of mouse’ (WoM)) have been extensively reported and assessed across contexts, through consumer behaviour, services marketing, relationship marketing, marketing communication and strategy lenses.