752 The Marketing Book
This holistic approach to the way in which
marketing delivers the goods and services that
we consume takes us far beyond trying to
identify green consumers, develop green prod-
ucts, and persuade the former to pay an extra
few per cent for the latter. It suggests a much
broader research agenda, encompassing:
sustainable service and PSS impacts;
sustainable service and PSS methodologies;
the relationship between sustainable ‘solutions
development’ and supply chain/network or
value management;
cross-functional working practices required to
achieve higher net sustainable value through
sustainable solutions;
management approaches required to create
higher levels of net sustainable value.
The future of green marketing
Sustainability as a concept can be contro-
versial, open to multiple interpretations, very
hard to measure, and difficult to translate into
meaningful action amongst the very real polit-
ical, economic and technological constraints
faced by companies and governments. The
underlying point, however, is very clear. Any
system or activity that is not sustainable ulti-
mately cannot be sustained. Although this can
be dismissed as a truism, it is a point that
often seems to be missed. The last 50 years
have witnessed some extraordinary develop-
ments in technologies, products, markets and
marketing. They have also witnessed a doub-
ling of world population from around three to
around six billion. Without becoming more
sustainable, over the next 50 years, marketing
will struggle to do more than to deliver an
increasingly mixed and short-term set of bless-
ings, to a shrinking proportion of the world’s
population.
The dangers of unsustainable growth
have rarely been more clearly illustrated than
during the boom and bust of the ‘dotcom’
financial bubble and the subsequent Enron
and WorldCom scandals. It demonstrated
many simple truths about the need for busi-
nesses to deliver real benefits and generate
real and sustainable income streams, and also
the dangers of profligate spending today on
the promise of the wealth that new technolo-
gies will deliver tomorrow. These truths also
apply to the industrialized economies as a
whole. Many of the environmental costs of
production and consumption are not being
fully reflected (either directly or indirectly via
taxation) in the cost structures of companies
and the prices paid by their customers. This
means that society and the environment are
currently subsidizing our consumption and
production. Our businesses are environmen-
tally ‘over-trading’ – a position that cannot be
maintained indefinitely. Companies can grow
and apparently prosper while running up
huge financial debts (as Enron showed). The
danger is that the longer the bills go unpaid,
and the longer the debt mounts up, the more
destructive the crash then becomes. While our
businesses continue to consume the Earth’s
natural capital at an unsustainable rate, the
risks grow that this environmental debt will
create significant social and environmental
consequences. The world cannot maintain its
recent trends of growth in consumption and
production without future consumers, and the
billions living outside the consumer economy,
bearing the cost.
The role that marketing can, and should,
play in the development of a more sustainable
economy has been the subject of some debate.
Marketing has often been presented as part of
the problem in stimulating unsustainable levels
of consumption, and in using public relations
and other means of communication to obscure
or deny the negative consequences of that
consumption. Marketing is also frequently pre-
sented as an important part of the solution in
the context of market mechanisms being used
to encourage more sustainable consumption. It
is certainly true that marketing as a tool can be
used to help or hinder the sustainability