Ethical and sustainable marketing

Ethics, sustainability and the notion of corporate social responsibility (CSR) have gained enormous attention in today's (business) world. However, ethics and sustainability present many challenges for marketing practioners. To address these topics, the course is organized in two main parts :

• (1) ethics and social responsibility in marketing ;
• (2) the marketing of sustainability and social responsibility, with a focus on CSR communication and consumer responses to CSR.

At the end of the course, students should be able to:

• Understand what ethics and social responsibility mean in marketing and communication
• Identify the main challenges that marketing practioners face with respect to the development, communication, and evaluation of ethical and responsible practices
• Take a critical stance toward companies’ ethical and unethical marketing practices
• Understand consumers’ responses to CSR and how it influences the perceived credibility of CSR communication
• Take a critical stance toward various CSR communication campaigns and, in particular, recognize the risks of greenwashing as well as the opportunities linked to a well-designed CSR communication strategy
• Put theory into practice by formulating relevant recommendation and ideas to improve existing marketing practices and CSR communication campaigns

• Theory
• Case discussions and exercises

References, bibliography, and recommended reading

There are no mandatory textbook for this course. However, the content of the course will in part be based on :

• Belz F.-M. and Peattie K. (2012), "Sustainability Marketing", 2nd edition, Wiley. 
• Bhattacharya CB, Sen S., and Korschun D. (2011), "Leveraging corporate responsibility", Cambridge University Press. 
• Eagle L. and Dahl S. (2015), Marketing ethics & society", Sage. 

Additional readings may be provided on UV course website. 

Course notes

• Université virtuelle

Contacts

Catherine Janssen (catherine.janssen@ulb.be)
Teaching assistants: Martin Daubechies (martin.daubechies@ulb.be) and Natacha Kahan (natacha.kahan@ulb.be)

Campus

Solbosch

Method(s) of evaluation

• written examination
• Group work

written examination

• Open question with developed answer

Group work

During the semester, several in-class exercises will be done on small case studies. Students will be able to earn bonus points for the first-session (June) written exam. 

Mark calculation method (including weighting of intermediary marks)

100% written exam. 
The objective of the final exam is to assess students' knowledge of the course content and their ability to analyze real-world situations and/or CSR communication campaigns. 
The professor reserves the right to call any student for an additional oral interview following the written exam in order to verify their personal knowledge and mastery of the submitted exam content. 

Language(s) of evaluation

• english