Social, economic, and environmental implications of drones in marketing: A framework of safeguards for sustainable technology implementation

• The work studies commercial drones in marketing with a sustainability-centric approach. • Technologies in marketing impact economic, social, and environmental sustainability. • Safeguards can help maximize benefits and minimize harms of technology in marketing. • This work proposes an Integrated Safeguards Framework for technologies in marketing. Emerging technologies in marketing can bring sustainability benefits but can also cause harms to the environment, the economy, and society. To better realize global sustainability goals, this empirically grounded study contributes a framework of safeguards for technologies in marketing. Focusing on the increasingly prevalent technology of commercial aerial drones, the authors employed inductive research involving a fully qualitative survey of 240 commercial drone experts, marketing professionals, and the general public to explore the sustainability implications of commercial drones. The findings reveal that commercial drones are linked to a range of benefits and harms, and that three groups of safeguards – technical safeguards, policy safeguards, and inclusive public safeguards – could create value by reducing the possible harms and bolstering the benefits of commercial drones in marketing.