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In order to curb the potential wide spreading of profiteering, in the UK for example its competition watchdog, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), set up a special taskforce to crack down on companies profiting from the pandemic by inflating prices or making misleading claims about products ( Butler, 2020a, Butler, 2020b). It has been reported that some firms/retailers have tried to profiteering from this crisis. In terms of marketing, we will focus on its potential implications on the core marketing concepts, the context of marketing, and marketing strategy.Ĭovid-19 poses challenges to firms and organizations with regard to CSR. In terms of CSR, we will discuss its impact on CSR opportunities and trends, and consumer ethics. In this paper, we discuss some preliminary ideas on how this pandemic can influence the field of CSR and marketing philosophy. However the pandemic will end, it is already set to have long-lasting profound economic, social, political, and cultural impacts. The short-term impact of Covid-19 is immediately and effortlessly felt, due to the widespread lockdown and social distancing measures globally. Therefore probably the Covid-19 pandemic represents one of the most significant environmental changes in the modern marketing history, which could potentially have a profound impact on corporate social responsivity (CSR), consumer ethics, and basic marketing philosophy. The impact of Covid-19 on the global economy is likely to be unprecedented since the 1930s Great Depression ( Euronews, 2020). Is Covid-19 an example of this – we think so? After Covid-19 the world will not be the same and notwithstanding numerous apocalyptic movies, conspiracy theorists, and political opportunists, we cannot but help to hope that future pandemics can be avoided if we learn the lessons, we cannot help but think should have been learned before Covid-19. That is, after shocks that change cultures happen, people within those shocked cultures almost immediately rationalize such events by reflecting that they could have been predicted and probably avoided. While Taleb (2008) discussed a range of examples of such past events (such as the events of 911) his analysis highlighted that human responses to such shocks tend toward critical reverse prediction. In many regards, we view Covid-19 as analogous to that which Taleb (2008) calls a ‘Black Swan Event’ – a shocking event that changes the world (as similarly also noted concurrently by a number of authors and editors – see for example Grech, 2020, Mazzoleni et al., 2020). The pain is personal, emotional, psychological, societal, economic, and cultural and it will leave scars. Notwithstanding the human tragedy of lost lives, broken families, and scarred communities, the economic and social changes caused by a pandemic-driven lockdown will constitute a cultural legacy which will live long in our memories and those of future generations. Like other global events with planet-wide impact, Covid-19 could potentially change how we see the world, the ways in which we think, and how we conduct our lives. What we do know is that the world has changed. Probably one of the most important ways to cope with this lockdown to avoid any deterioration of mental and physical wellbeing is to take advantage of the situation to reflect on something that we cherish the most in our research, in our case corporate social responsivity (CSR) and marketing. What is more, we have to do this with little prior warning or training. Whilst academics like us are still busy with our usual research activities, we are learning to adjust to a new reality and way of work (and life, though the boundary is diminished during lockdown) with online meetings with colleagues, research students, and of course quite ‘dauntingly’ online teaching. We are writing this article during the first period of lockdown in the UK and being “responsible citizens” by complying with the social distancing measures.
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