Assignment Sample on MK6022 Contemporary issues in Marketing

1.0 Introduction

Sustainable marketing is the practice of promoting environmentally friendly products so that the next generation will not get affected from the business perspective. In the 21st century, pollution has been a major issue for quite some time. Issues like global warming and increasing use of greenhouse gases have been harming the natural flow of this world. This is the main reason why the marketing of eco-friendly products has been a major practice in this century. Sustainable marketing has been directly dependent on the marketable product. The business organizations have been hugely promoting “Corporate Social Responsibility” inside the organization. The popularity of the products that are either reusable or responsible socially and less harming to nature have been a the main target of these organizations who practices on Sustainable products and marketing. The main duties of the people engaging in sustainable marketing are to inform the general public about the products and encourage general people to use these types of products. During the 1970’s the head marketing organization of the USA organized some workshops on the topic “Ecological Marketing”.  The term “Green marketing” or sustainable marketing first got popularized in the last decade of the 1980’s, before that the very few times this process was discussed. During the same time scientists and environmental workers around the world started to raise their voice about pollution and global warming and tried to tell the people about the negative sides of it. The sustainable marketing got popularized quickly after the negative sides got highlighted to people more and various organizations started to implement and practice sustainable marketing. This report will discuss the positives and negatives of sustainable marketing and critically analyze some author’s papers about the topic.

2.0 Discussion

This part of the report will study, review and critically analyze the various renowned authors’ journals or papers about the topic sustainable marketing.

2.1 Critical Literature Review

According to Kortam et al 2020, the words sustainability and marketing for general public and professionals might seem polar opposite of each other but a theory can be to use these two together in the business field for the betterment of this world. The author explained that the main objective of the paper is finding a way to incorporate sustainability and marketing in the same sentence and making this an integrated field. The researchers discussed the importance of sustainable marketing in depth. Humans need to find a way to reduce the use of products that are harmful for the environment and sustainable marketing has the duty to teach that to people. The main concern of the authors is that the popularity of the research of sustainable marketing might fade away in future (Rodrigues et al 2019). This is the reason why it is important to create a proper structure for the future. They also discussed the main three objectives of sustainable marketing. First of all, the waste must be reduced while packaging a product for promotion or the reusable packages must be used for the promotion. Second of all, sustainable marketing encourages the customer to engage in the marketing rather than just trading the product. They can use the various social media platforms like “facebook”, “Instagram”, “Twitter” etc to build a long term relationship with the customers. The final aim should be the promotional advertisements have to be long term to reduce the cost of promotion and advertising. They also discussed the controversies that might surround an organization while developing the strategies of sustainable marketing. There might be debate about the strategies as the goals of all stakeholders are not achieved by sustainable marketing. The author suggested the organizational goals should be the primary focus while discussing the strategies rather than the individual workers. Though the authors discussed various topics according to their research objectives, the paper lacked a quantitative analysis. That is using a real case study or the statistics of a real organization to establish their point.

According to Jung et al 2020, sustainability in marketing is a critical issue in today’s market. The organizations cannot ignore the environmental and social issues of the present time and do their business on their own. The main aims of the paper are to study the traditional market of fashion designing and establish the theory of positive sides of sustainable marketing to improve the image of the brand, social, environmental and economic growth. They used a mixed method that is they used both the theoretical point of view and quantitative study to establish their points. They asked a set of questions to the people working in this field and the customers (Mulcahy et al 2018). They mainly established four activities of sustainable marketing that are the loyalties of the customers, the trust of the customers, the image of the brand and the satisfaction of the customers. The image of the brand is defined as the emblematic meaning connected with the organization which represents their impression to the wider audience. The trust of the customer is defined as the faith they have for the organization and their products. The loyalty of the customer is defined as the willingness that the customer will buy the product from the same company. The satisfaction is defined as the pleasure of buying the product by its quality and service. The authors discussed that these are very much connected to each other and all of those significantly increased while using sustainable marketing techniques. Based on their questionnaire and added calculations they proved that in the field of fashion the use of sustainable marketing has positive impacts on the four activities of sustainability. Though the researchers used mixed methods to prove their hypothesis, their proofs are solely based on the fashion market. They have not discussed the effect of a sustainable market in the other sectors.

2.2 Practical implications of sustainable marketing

Sustainable market has been popularizing in recent years and many practical implications have been theorized and successfully used in this field.

Relevance of sustainable marketing to the business organization

One of the most important implications of a sustainable environment is the image of the brand. The brand image of an organization gets relatively improved by using this method as the customer understands the organization’s motive clearly. According to sustainable marketing the target is to build a long term relationship with the customers with that the economy of the organization gets improved and the “corporate social responsibility” of the organization also gets improved (Hay et al 2021). The sustainable marketing promotes waste free advertisement and promotion so the cost of the organization is reduced to a significant amount. The business organizations have the duty to save the resources for the future generations so that they will not be in a problem during their time. A proper sustainable market strategy has the same objective of improving the environmental and social status. Customer faith and loyalty are the most important things for an organization’s future as they not only ensure the financial safety of the company but also help reach the organizational objective (Huang et al 2019). The main aim of sustainable marketing is to connect with a wider audience with trust and make them loyal to the organization for a foreseeable future. This also means the popularity of the product will not fade away in near future. The reusable feature of this also makes sure the promotional cost of an organization is reduced significantly as the business organization has a bad reputation for wasting resources.

Figure 1: Implication of sustainable marketing

(Source: https://saylordotorg.github.io)

Relevance of sustainable marketing to the society

Sustainable marketing thinks more about the society and the future generation than the traditional way of marketing (Farrukh et al 2021). Sustainable marketing looks after the satisfaction of the client about the product and according to the needs of the client the product is made rather than forcing a product. The primary duty of human lives has to save the environment for them and for the future generations.

Figure 2: Sustainable Marketing on Society

(Source: https://link.springer.net)

The sustainable marketing promotes the products that are less harmful for the environment and the products are equally effective than the counter parts. Sustainable marketing promotes the study of more renewable energy and reusable resources so that nature gets less affected from the marketing products.

2.3 Drawbacks of Sustainable Marketing

There are many negative sides of sustainable marketing. The major drawback is the lack of communication between the general public and the business organization (Aryanto et al 2020). The target is to reach more people with sustainable marketing but the main problem is connecting the people as they do not understand the business terms.

Figure 3: Challenges of sustainable marketing

(Source: https://www.researchgate.net)

The products need reusable material which is very much costly and a matter of lots of research, which requires a huge amount of intelligent manpower and investment. The technology to implement sustainable marketing also needs a lot of money and manpower along with a foreseeable time.

3.0 Conclusion

To conclude the whole report, sustainable marketing has been popularizing with time and many organizations are using this strategy to improve their marketing and reduce the cost. This report described in detail about the positives and challenges of sustainable strategy to help evaluate the overall concept. In the discussion section many acclaimed authors’ papers have been studied, reviewed and critically evaluated to understand the background and depth of the sustainable strategy. The practical implications and challenges have been stated in the next section to evaluate the good and bad sides of sustainable marketing.

Reference List

Journals

Aryanto, V.D.W., Wismantoro, Y. and Paramitadevi, Y.V., 2020. The Climate Change Issue towards Behavioral Intentions: A Perspective of Social Marketing. International Journal of Energy Economics and Policy, 10(2), p.483.

Farrukh, M., Raza, A., Meng, F., Wu, Y. and Gu, Z., 2021. Shaping social marketing research: a retrospective of the journal of social marketing. Journal of Social Marketing.

Hay, R., Eagle, L. and Bhati, A. eds., 2021. Broadening cultural horizons in social marketing: Comparing case studies from Asia-Pacific. Springer Singapore.

Huang, L., Clarke, A., Heldsinger, N. and Tian, W., 2019. The communication role of social media in social marketing: a study of the community sustainability knowledge dissemination on LinkedIn and Twitter. Journal of Marketing Analytics, 7(2), pp.64-75.

Mulcahy, R.F., Russell-Bennett, R., Zainuddin, N. and Kuhn, K.A., 2018. Designing gamified transformative and social marketing services: an investigation of serious m-games. Journal of Service Theory and Practice.

Popescu, D.I., 2018. Social responsibility and business ethics: VII. Circular economy and the role of corporate social marketing. Calitatea, 19(163), pp.118-121.

Rodrigues, R.G. and Carlos, V.S., 2021. Attracting potential blood donors: The role of personality and social marketing. Journal of Philanthropy and Marketing, 26(3), p.e1694.

Rundle-Thiele, S., David, P., Willmott, T., Pang, B., Eagle, L. and Hay, R., 2019. Social marketing theory development goals: an agenda to drive change. Journal of Marketing Management, 35(1-2), pp.160-181.

Shawky, S., Kubacki, K., Dietrich, T. and Weaven, S., 2019. Using social media to create engagement: A social marketing review. Journal of Social Marketin