Marketing and sustainability: Practitioners' perspectives and practice

Abstract

For the marketing discipline to transform to facilitate the UN’s sustainable development goals, marketing scholarship needs to assess stakeholders’ perspectives. This study explores commercial marketing practitioners’ perspectives and practices regarding sustainability and sustainable consumption through in-depth interviews with nine New Zealand commercial marketing professionals. Results indicate sustainability was seen as important but lacks integration into practitioners’ practice. This research also identifies a knowledge gap regarding sustainability, sustainable consumption and marketing’s role to facilitate sustainability and achievement of the sustainable development goals. Our findings indicate that education for marketing practitioners and integration of sustainability in organisations’ core values are needed to enable the marketing function to support the sustainable development goals.