Marketing Scholarship and the Sustainable Development Goals: Thoughts on Moving Forward

Abstract

This article is a commentary on how marketing scholarship can be more relevant as it tackles the human development challenges presented by the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The commentary argues that as businesses are transforming themselves into purpose-driven organizations, marketing needs to be a part of that transformation. SDG 1 No Poverty and SDG 12 Sustainable Consumption and Production are discussed within the article. The commentary also tackles the institutional barriers that work against path-breaking SDG marketing scholarship: normative promotion and publication expectations along with the practitioner-academic research divide. Without realigning the incentives that reward original, boundary-spanning SDG marketing scholarship, the marketing discipline will be stuck in a cycle of rewarding one behavior while hoping for another.

The Sustainability Pyramid: A Hierarchical Approach to Greater Sustainability and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals With Implications for Marketing Theory, Practice, and Public Policy

“…Sustainability scholars such as Bolton (2021), Lim (2022), and Rosenbloom (2021) have also issued recent calls for a reexamination of how marketers and policy makers should approach sustainability in light of its dire condition and progress. Therefore, in the following sections, this paper presents a conceptual model to address the shortcomings of existing approaches to sustainability.…”

“…Yet, unsustainable consumption and the problems associated to it (e.g. carbon and ecological footprint, climate change) have continued to persist a decade later, prompting Bolton (2021), Lim (2022), and Rosenbloom (2021) to suggest a need to change the way sustainability scholars think. Moreover, sustainability issues, and thus goals, have increased rather than decreased over the years-as evident by the increase from eight United Nations Millennium Development Goals (UN MDGs) (2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015) to 17 United Nations Sustainability Development Goals (UN SDGs) (2016)(2017)(2018)(2019)(2020)(2021)(2022)(2023)(2024)(2025)(2026)(2027)(2028)(2029)(2030).…”

Re-imagining Marketing Scholarship in the era of the UN Sustainable Development Goals

“…The SDGs continue to garner increasing support within marketing scholarship as a vehicle to engage with societal issues, as well as a mechanism to be relevant and have an impact (Bolton, 2022;Conduit et al, 2021;de Ruyter et al, 2022;Rosenbloom, 2022;Scott et al, 2022;. For example, Scott et al (2022, p. 1) state that the SDG framework allows scholarship to have "consistent .…”

“…As noted in the invited commentaries by Bolton (2022) and Rosenbloom (2022), marketing is amid a paradigm change where they acknowledge that all work in marketing should be considering the SDGs. Whilst entities have emerged in support of making responsibility the cornerstone for all organizational actors and actions, (e.g.…”

“…The SDGs provide businesses with the opportunity to rethink their purpose and marketing strategy to contribute toward the SDG agenda by building and maintaining sustainable relationships with consumers and other important stakeholders to improve the social and natural environments (e.g. Bolton, 2022;Rosenbloom, 2022;Scott et al, 2022). Specifically, marketing is about creating value such that the short-term goals are not attained at the cost of harming the long term, meaning combining both profits (short term) while keeping in mind the purpose of its existence (long term).…”