The Marketing Department at the UConn School of Business hosted its 12th annual Voya Financial Colloquium on the topic of “Social Responsibility and Impact in Business.” The event, held on Oct 25th, 2024, brought together researchers from diverse perspectives to discuss the role of business in economic, social and environmental sustainability.

“This year’s topic is near and dear to our hearts, as it dovetails with the soft launch of our new MS program in Social Responsibility and Impact in Business. In our program, we think of this as encompassing many areas – it’s not just environmental sustainability, but also economic and social sustainability, as well as fair labor practices, and more,” said UConn Marketing professor Christina Kan, who organized the event.

The colloquium featured four distinguished speakers – Professors Martin Mende, Gergana Nenkov, Anita Rao and Michael Posner – each of whom approached the topic from a different lens – including marketing and law – as well as different methodologies – including experimental and econometric approaches.

The colloquium fostered an energetic discourse between speakers and participants. Faculty and doctoral students from all over the UConn campus attended, including marketing, law and the Human Rights Institute. Also in attendance were guests from UMass and URI.

Below are profiles of the guest speakers and an abstract of their presentations:

Martin Mende, the J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation Professor in Services Leadership at Arizona State University, provided an overview of multiple papers at the intersection of a sustainable future and financial inclusion. He first discussed how the United Nations (UN) 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) can serve as a fruitful foundation for impactful marketing research, and the areas in which consumer research has made progress, as well as opportunities for future research. Second, he described how financial inclusion is critical for progress toward many of the SDGs. He presented insights from field studies on how mainstream banks can more successfully operate in banking deserts by increasing consumers’ perception of communal financial orientation. He also shared results from a series of studies on racial discrimination in financial loan services.

Gergana Nenkov is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Carroll School of Management, and Affiliate Faculty at the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society, Boston College. Her presentation featured research on how to enhance environmental sustainability. While the “3Rs” of sustainable living – reduce, reuse, recycle – have been widely promoted, consumer practices that reduce consumption waste by extending products’ lifespan have more direct environmental benefits. Professor Nenkov shared research identifying strategies to extend product lifespans through encouraging consumers to: 1) reuse and 2) repair their products. She found that transformation salience (i.e., giving products a new life by transforming them) can be harnessed to increase the duration of product usage. She also shared insights that promoting repair behavior as a commitment to one’s products can be an effective communication strategy, especially among a brand’s loyal consumers, who are particularly inclined to upgrade rather than repair their branded possessions.

Anita Rao, the Beyer Family Associate Professor of Marketing at Georgetown University, explored how animal welfare labels impact consumer demand for fresh meat products in the German grocery retailing sector. Her research approach exploits the quasi-experimental variation in consumers’ exposure to the label to measure the impact on (i) choices of meat labeled with the highest animal welfare standard, and (ii) the change in the willingness to pay for meat associated with the highest animal welfare standard. Her findings reveal that the share of households’ meat purchases with the highest animal welfare standards goes up by 2.19 percentage points and the willingness to pay increases by 0.31 (EUR/500g) for the average German household after the label introduction. Altogether, her research speaks to the notion that consumers are actually willing to change their behavior when presented with accurate information on the conditions under which animals are raised.

Michael Posner is the Jerome Kohlberg Professor of Ethics and Finance at NYU’s Stern School of Business, and the Director of the Center for Business and Human Rights at the School, the first-ever human rights center at a business school. He offered a thought-provoking presentation on human rights in business. He noted that over the last 30 years, there has been increasing attention to the obligations of global companies to protect human rights in their business operations. Initially most companies drew the line at abiding by local laws in the places where they do business. Gradually many companies have come to realize that they need to do more. As the European Union starts to build a more ambitious global regulatory model, Professor Posner assessed the current state of efforts to promote human rights as a core business priority, especially for large multinational companies.