THEORETICAL BACKGROUND
This chapter's theoretical background is the principles and perspectives of marketing. One of the chapter's goals is to position sustainability marketing as an extension of traditional marketing practices, but of course with some new additional elements as required by sustainability marketing as developed in the chapter: The triple bottom line (profit-planet-people), stakeholder theory, and sustainable development.
The chapter's primary perspectives are the “fundamentals” of marketing that are universal: Putting the customer at the center of the entire organization; building marketing programs backward from customer wants and needs; using the principles of segmenting and targeting to concentrate firm resources on consumer groups that will be most responsive to the firm's offerings; developing products/services that create value though meaningful differentiation; adapting the marketing mix to specific target markets; and recognizing that marketing is a total organizational response to finding and keeping customers.
Yet sustainability marketing requires two additional theoretical frames: The triple bottom line and stakeholder theory. The triple bottom line (TBL) summarizes the requirement that companies consider profit, people, and planet – and the tradeoffs involved when trying to optimize the benefits for all three – in all company decisions. Stakeholder theory expresses the more inclusive idea that a number of groups beyond investors and customers can influence and are, in turn, influenced by company decisions. Therefore, stakeholders much be considered in all strategic decisions of a firm.
This focus on marketing fundamentals was done intentionally, so that students can more easily see that sustainability marketing uses universal principles of marketing – principles that students may already be familiar with. Only at chapter's end are the challenges raised by sustainability marketing to the standard marketing model outlined. Since the chapter's goal is focused otherwise, these challenges are only mentioned briefly.
Marketing has always been at the center of every organization. Peter Drucker (Drucker, 1954) has famously stated that there are only two core functions for every business: innovation and marketing. Drucker goes on to say that the purpose of every business is to get and keep a customer – the very essence of marketing. As “marketing” continues to evolve, social marketing applies marketing principles to a broad range of organizations that extend beyond entities engaging in commerce. For example, health care institutions, college/universities, nonprofits, governmental, and social service agencies all use social marketing to help them achieve their missions. Peter Drucker also brought his insights to social marketing when he said, “The ‘non-profit’ institution neither supplies goods or services …. Its product is a changed human being … a cured patient, a child that learns, a young man or woman grown into a self-respecting adult; a changed human life altogether” (Drucker, 1990/2011, p. x). Social marketing seeks to change human behavior for the betterment of society (Saunders, Barrington, & Sridharan, 2015).
The application of marketing principles to benefit society is also found in one of marketing's newest fields of study: sustainability marketing. Sustainability marketing gives tangible expression to the increased demands from stakeholders that businesses should think beyond the confines of their spreadsheets and become active partners in addressing some of the world's biggest global challenges (e.g., poverty, climate change, inequality, sustainable development, sustainable consumption) (Brammer, Branicki, Linnenluecke, & Smith, 2019).
This chapter's focus is on sustainability marketing. The chapter's first half discusses the importance of sustainability in marketing. In so doing, it answers the question why sustainability marketing is an important issue for contemporary marketing, it defines what sustainability marketing is, and it untangles three words often used in discussions about sustainability marketing: “sustainable,” “sustainability,” and “sustainable development.” The chapter's second half focuses squarely on marketing pedagogy by presenting a framework for teaching and learning about sustainability marketing suitable for use in the marketing classroom. This Sustainability Marketing Framework has three unique elements: (1) It explicitly incorporates the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a gateway for marketing educators to teach about – and for students, in turn, to learn about – sustainability marketing; (2) it acknowledges that sustainability marketing shares some common features with social marketing, since the overriding goal of both is to improve the well-being of individuals and society; and (3) it integrates macro- and micro-level marketing perspectives to provide a comprehensive view of sustainability marketing. Because sustainability marketing is a relatively new topic, the chapter's second half provides examples of how marketing educators can apply the Sustainability Marketing Framework in case analyses, in active learning exercises, and in developing students’ critical thinking skills.
A PRELUDE TO SUSTAINABILITY MARKETING: A VERY SHORT REVIEW OF MARKETING FUNDAMENTALS
Historically, marketing has focused primarily on consumers engaging in commercial transactions. The consumer orientation places the in-depth understanding of consumer needs and wants at marketing's core (Kotler & Armstrong, 2014; Lee & Edwards, 2013; Ramaswamy & Namakumari, 2018). Through marketing science, whose focus is always to better understand consumers in all their complexities, come ideas for competitive products and/services, which are, in turn, redirected back to consumers through a tailored marketing mix. Levitt (1960) reinforces this point by noting that
an industry is a customer-satisfying process, not a goods-producing process…. An industry begins with the customer and his or her needs …. Given the customer's needs, the industry develops backwards, first concerning itself with the physical delivery of customer satisfactions. Then it moves back further to creating the things by which these sati...
