Sustainable Marketing Management

Dear Colleagues,

Over the last few decades, much interest and effort has been put in supporting a sustainable economic development both from an industrial and an academic point of view. In fact, since the sustainable development was defined as that which “meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (WCED, 1987), many companies have started putting much effort in modifying their businesses in order to meet this requirement. At the same time, a copious body of research has been done on exploring how pursuing sustainability can be done in practice and its main effects on companies, business, and society as a whole (Hunt, 2011). In particular, there has been much interest in examining how the marketing function has to evolve in order to embrace a sustainable development. Van Dam and Apeldoorn (1996) defined “sustainable marketing” as marketing within, and supportive of, sustainable economic development. Several complexities have been raised over time in putting this definition into practice, and recently, some frameworks were proposed to help in achieving it. In particular, Gordon et al. (2011) proposed a sustainable marketing framework which includes the concepts of green marketing (i.e., how to develop and market more sustainable products and service whilst introducing sustainability efforts as the core of the marketing and business process), social marketing (i.e., how to use the power of upstream and downstream marketing interventions to encourage sustainable behavior), and critical marketing (i.e., how to analyze marketing using a critical-theory-based approach to guide regulation and control and stimulate innovation in markets with a focus on sustainability, but moreover challenging some of the dominant institutions of the capitalist and marketing systems, to construct a more sustainable marketing discipline).

In addition to these studies, much work needs to be done. For instance, it is of great interest how the growing trends toward sustainability are supported and impacted by the emergence of new business and economy models, such as sharing economy, circular economy, platform-based economy (Chamberlin and Boks, 2018; Lewandowski, 2016; Roma et al., 2019; Schaltegger et al., 2016), as well as by the evolution of social and technological tools, such as social media, mobile devices, etc. (Minton et al., 2012). With this Special Issue, we aim at improving our understanding of sustainable marketing management from a broad perspective and its effects on businesses and society as a whole. Hence, we encourage the submission of theoretical, conceptual, and empirical works that provide new insights to open the black box of how sustainable marketing management is reshaping traditional industries and markets across multiple aspects.

Specifically, questions include but are not limited to the following aspects:

• Strategic
  • Risks, weaknesses, and opportunities due to the implementation of sustainable marketing activities;
  • Sustainable marketing dynamics and strategies;
  • Boundary conditions enabling the adoption of sustainable marketing activities in existing business models;
  • Emerging trade-offs going along with the introduction or adoption of sustainable marketing activities;
  • Incentives to technological and/or business model innovation under the sustainable marketing management;
  • New business and economy models supporting marketing in the context of sustainability (e.g., sharing economy, circular economy, platform-based business models)
  • Social media marketing strategies for sustainable development;
• Competitive
  • Differences between sustainable vs. traditional marketing practices;
  • Antecedents and consequences of the entrance of players adopting sustainable marketing management in the market;
• Organizational
  • Managerial and organizational implications related to the entrance of players adopting sustainable marketing management in the market;
  • Types and archetypes of players adopting sustainable marketing management;
  • Governance mechanisms of business models using sustainable marketing characteristics;
• Performance-related
  • Performance implications of the sustainable marketing management on incumbents and new entrants;
  • Characteristics of the players adopting sustainable marketing management that mostly affect business models performance;
  • Resources and capabilities underlying the introduction and adoption of sustainable marketing-based business models;
  • The impact of operational decisions (e.g., matching algorithms, pricing) under sustainable marketing management;
• Users-related
  • User adoption and behavior with respect to sustainable marketing activities;
• Externalities-related
  • Geographical, social, cultural, demographic and industry-related issues in sustainable marketing activities;
  • Local impact (e.g., congestion, environmental effects);
  • Social marketing-related issues;
  • Employment, welfare, and regulation considerations implied by the sustainable marketing activities.

Dr. Umberto Panniello
Dr. Roma Paolo
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainability
• development
• marketing
• society
• business
• economy
• business models
• economy models