Marketers have often faced criticism for pushing the consumption of unsustainable products and lifestyles through unsustainable means such as print media. As such, the idea that marketers might contribute to, rather than erode, sustainable development is a compelling one.

The sustainability challenges facing society today are forcing businesses and marketers to search for more sustainable ways of maintaining relationships with customers and delivering value to them. From this shift has emerged the concept of sustainability marketing.

This new brand of marketing seeks to stop marketing managers from merely reacting to social change in order to further their commercial propositions, and instead proactively lead social change in order to contribute to a more sustainable society. According to the authors of Sustainability Marketing: A Global Perspective, Frank-Martin Belz and Ken Peattie, sustainability marketing is an evolution of marketing that blends today’s economics and technologies with the emerging concepts of relationship marketing and the social, ethical, environmental and intergenerational perspectives of the sustainable development agenda. It has a consumer focus with an emphasis on integrating sustainability principles into both marketing theory and the practical, everyday decision-making of marketing managers. It is not exactly ‘new’ marketing, they say, so much as ‘improved’ marketing.

The crux of the case for sustainable marketing is that by not engaging in sustainable marketing practices, the discipline of marketing will continue to be complicit in driving global crises through overconsumption. This of course does little to further the reputation of marketing, which has long been branded as a discipline in crisis with few metrics to prove otherwise.

While Belz and Peattie admit that ‘viewing marketing as a force that can shape the world might seem like nothing more than self-aggrandisement on the part of marketers’, they do make the valid point that, in the liberal consumer democracies that make up the majority of the world’s richest societies today, the products we consume are marketed to us. That is, the influence of marketing on the choices consumers make is prolific – even endemic. Some may even go so far as to say that if society is going to change, marketing needs to change first.

Indeed, the first edition of Philip Kotler’s Principles of Marketing to be published in the 21st century described one of the central issues facing marketing today as transforming sustainability issues in mainstream marketing from afterthought to context. The fact is that when Kotler makes a point of something, you know the writing is on the wall – marketing, like the markets it serves, needs to evolve. While Belz and Peattie make a number of valid points about this topic in their own textbook, I can’t help but think that their description of sustainability marketing – as ‘marketing that endures forEVER’ – is one that reeks of self-importance and contradicts, even undermines, Kotler’s and their vision entirely. It’s a clichéd phrase that goes nowhere towards capturing the imperative facing marketing today: to connect with a rapidly changing society of consumers who generate their own content, demand dialogue and expect all business practices – marketing-related or otherwise – to respect the impact they may be having on the environment.

I don’t know about you but I don’t want my marketing efforts to endure forever. I want my marketing efforts to be effective and efficient now. I don’t need my outputs, physical or emotional, to endure for all of eternity like some trophy on a mantelpiece. I want my marketing campaigns to be biodegradable: to break down naturally over time when their job is done, to be absorbed without a trace, to be recycled into something more useful.

It’s perhaps a small point in an otherwise well-rounded argument by Belz and Peattie, but surely marketing that endures is, by definition, passé – and not what is really meant by the term sustainability marketing. Marketing should be practised sustainably, yes, but should not, in and of itself, be sustainable. To ‘endure forever’ defeats the purpose of marketing entirely – to satisfy the current, unknown or emerging needs of a prescribed group of customers (at a profit of course) and thereby remain relevant and meaningful. Brand managers must continually evolve the way they market their brands (journey through the history of Europe’s largest fashion houses if you need proof) or risk irrelevance and, ultimately, extinction.

Candice O’Sullivan is Head of Strategy at WellmarkPerspexa, a business-to-business communications agency that believes in enduring brands, not marketing that endures.

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