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Introduction
In the development of organizational strategies, firms must realize that they are responsible to numerous internal and external stakeholders. Each stakeholder group has a different set of expectations relating to firms' performance. These different expectations may cause conflict to arise between the firm and its stakeholders. Such conflict can be extremely detrimental for the industrial marketer, as industrial marketers tend to be more integrated with their customers and suppliers, two key stakeholder groups. Any strategic process which reduces potential conflict, such as the stakeholder management process, should therefore be extremely beneficial to industrial marketers.
The stakeholder concept can be traced back to 1963, where it was first mentioned by name in a Stanford Research Institute Memorandum (Freeman, 1984). Since then stakeholder theory (ST) has gained increasing use in strategy development literature. Its popularity has increased with the seminal publication of Freeman's (1984) Strategic Management: A Stakeholder Approach. ST has received extensive examination, with it being suggested that there are over 100 articles and several texts examining ST (Donaldson and Preston, 1995; The Toronto Conference, 1994). Much of this literature has suggested that ST allows the organization to consider a wider range of influencers when developing strategy and that earlier theories of the firm do not consider all of the "groups" that influence organizational activities. Marketers have also identified that the existing theories of the firm are not adequate and suggest that a broader range of groups should be considered (Anderson, 1989). Thus, it would appear that stakeholder theory, as discussed in the management literature, would have significant implications for industrial marketers. Given the scope of this article, it is impossible to examine comprehensively the development of ST, but rather the focus of this work is to demonstrate how industrial marketers can readily apply ST, through the stakeholder management process, to marketing strategy development. This article will hopefully stimulate marketers to examine ST in more detail and further develop its use in marketing.
ST has not been utilized to any great extent in the industrial or consumer marketing strategy literature, let alone the newly evolving environmental marketing literature. While it has not been discussed explicitly, to some extent ST has implicitly been a core component of marketing theory, since the development of modern "marketing philosophy"....