In addition to working toward an organization’s triple bottom line goals of People, Planet, and Prosperity, sustainable marketing is a process that requires marketing to be executed with 3BL practices. In its process orientation, sustainable marketing is like democracy, which only exists if certain rules and processes are in place (e.g. elections, universal suffrage, individual freedoms, rule of law). Put another way, the game only exists when players apply the game’s rules.
Sustainable marketing as a process comprises three aspects: social, environmental, and financial.
On its path to stakeholder empowerment, socially sustainable marketing conducts itself in a way that benefits humanity. It consistently satisfies an organization stakeholders’ needs and benefits its community, measuring its social return on investment.
Sustainable marketing expands the reduce-reuse-recycle hierarchy of environmental sustainability to Rethink – Replenish – Reduce – Reuse – Recycle. I’ll elaborate on the quintet in a future series. The basic idea is to entirely reconsider marketing and its footprint and to replenish the renewable resources used in marketing before implementing the classic three-step.
Sustainable marketing delivers better long-term return than traditional marketing, particularly because it works with the triple bottom line. The positive financial impact of implementing socially and environmentally sustainable practices has been widely documented. A better understanding of stakeholders’ needs allows a sustainable marketer to be more focused, and with more focus comes better ROI. Reducing her use of marketing resources or shifting to more environmentally friendly practices allows a sustainable marketer to reduce, sometimes dramatically, her marketing expenditure.
Both posts defining sustainable marketing, as a goal and as a process, sketch the definition in general terms. Future posts will go into greater detail.
Until then, please take a minute to comment. Is sustainable marketing a viable discipline? What’s your understanding of it?
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Nice post. I think marketers (and in particular PR folks) spend significant resources sharing their company’s sustainability achievements and goals. In order to demonstrate their own integrity, marketers should be applying the same sustainability principles to their own business units and actions.
In general, the three bottom lines are not in contention, and optimizing one should have a positive impact (at least in the long run) on the other two “lines.” The factor which makes this generally true, is that eliminating waste has a positive impact across the bottom lines. From an economic standpoint it helps reduce costs, and from an environmental standpoint it reduces waste. Social measures tend to be harder to quantify, but the community and society benefit when company’s are profitable and the environment is protected.
@Eric Robbins: Making marketing sustainable goes both ways. Marketers should use the triple bottom line goals and practices, and business and sustainability experts should recognize the need and potential for marketing to contribute to sustainability in addition to promoting it.
Social measures do tend to be harder to evaluate, but if we do it consistently and long enough, best practices will evolve. Nonprofits can be a great resource to business in this regard.