“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers”- Seth Godin.
In the face of increasing consumers’ demand for ethical products, incorporating ethicality in the firm’s marketing strategies remains a key issue for marketing scholars and practitioners alike. With growing globalisation, intensifying competition, and dismantling trade barriers, numerous ethical transgressions regarding possible breach of ethicality in firms’ international operations have come to light. Despite these well-chronicled concerns about the exponential growth of ethical marketing problems worldwide, limited empirical attention has been given to research on the ethical aspects of exporting, which is the most common way for many firms to enter foreign markets. Accordingly, the aim of this thesis is to investigate the antecedents and consequences of the firm’s ethically-based export marketing strategy, as well as moderating effects caused by external forces in international markets. Drawing on the Resource-based View of the firm, the Industrial Organization theory and the Institutional theory, a comprehensive conceptual model is developed. This is empirically tested using structural equation modelling based on data collected from a sample of 208 UK exporting firms. The findings of the study underscore the critical role of certain organisational resources (i.e., reputational, relational and experiential) and capabilities (i.e., ethical leadership and ethical market orientation) in developing an ethically-based export marketing strategy (comprising product, price, distribution and promotional elements). They also suggest that the adoption of such an ethically-based export marketing strategy generates important reputational and ethical branding advantages for the exporting firms. However, this strategy-competitive advantage association was found to become stronger under conditions of high competitive intensity and low regulatory controls in the foreign market. The results also confirm that both reputational and ethical branding advantages are conducive to gaining enhanced social performance in the specific export market served. This positive social performance subsequently helps to improve export market performance, while enhanced export market performance has a favourable impact on export financial performance. Several theoretical, managerial, policy-making, and educational implications are derived from the study’s findings. There are several limitations which have to be taken into consideration in interpreting these findings. The thesis ends with useful directions for future research.
