Sustainable marketing: an exploratory study of a sustain-centric, versus profit-centric, approach

Abstract

As the need for business to address pressing social and ecological issues intensifies, so does the importance of enhancing the development of sustainable marketing. The current dominant approach to sustainable marketing is based on a Triple Bottom Line (TBL) profit-centric worldview, which suggests that firms can simultaneously improve their financial well-being as they reduce negative social and ecological externalities. However, whereas the scope of TBL marketing is limited to sustainability initiatives that enhance profits, there is a growing need for—and interest in—developing a sustain-centric approach to marketing that relaxes the need to maximize financial well-being in order to optimize social and ecological well-being. Even so, because of the dominance of the profit-centric worldview, hallmarks of sustain-centric marketing practices remain under-developed and may even lend themselves to becoming inauthentically mimicked on a piecemeal basis by greenwashing profit-centric firms. We provide an exploratory empirical study of marketing practices evident in two sustain-centric firms and draw implications to advance theory for both sustain-centric and profit-centric marketing.