Cross-cultural ranking of cellphone life cycle issues for strategic CSR marketing with social media-based AHP

The COVID-19 pandemic reinforced concern over sustainability and necessitated increased corporate social responsibility (CSR) presence. Besides, merely multiplying generic CSR messages would be perceived as greenwashing and thus counter-productive. In this study, we combine social media analytics capabilities and the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) to offer a customer-centric CSR marketing framework. First, we analyzed two months’ worth of Twitter data from countries in the US, UK, and India and reviewed the relevant literature on cellphone sustainability to identify 15 cellphone life cycle issues as alternatives. Then, we drew on the marketing notion of net promoter score (NPS) and the United Nations’ sustainable development goals (SDGs) along with product topic modeling to perform sentiment and network analysis and produce three criteria. Finally, AHP was employed with resultant criteria and alternatives to offer a unique ranking of CSR issues for the three countries. Sensitivity analyses were also conducted to check the results and find new robust rankings. Although phase consumption had the highest weight in the three countries, the phase end-of-life occupied the second position in developed countries, while phase production had this rank in the developing country of India. Local and global ranking of CSR issues was also determined. The contributions of this paper have significant implications for scholars and businesses, offering sustainability priorities via integrating customer engagement.