Sustainable Marketing: Social Responsibility and Ethics - Notes

Sustainable Marketing: Social Responsibility and Ethics

Unilever: Creating a Better Future Every Day

• Unilever's Sustainable Living Plan aims to improve the social and environmental impact of its products by working with billions of customers worldwide.
• Slogan: “Small actions. Big difference.”

Learning Objectives

• Define sustainable marketing and discuss its importance.
• Identify the major social criticisms of marketing.
• Define consumerism and environmentalism and explain how they affect marketing strategies.
• Describe the principles of sustainable marketing.
• Explain the role of ethics in marketing.

Sustainable Marketing

• Sustainable marketing is socially and environmentally responsible marketing that meets the present needs of consumers and businesses.
• It also preserves or enhances the ability of future generations to meet their needs.

Sustainable Marketing: Balancing Needs

• Marketing Concept: Meeting the current needs of both customers and the company.
• Strategic Planning Concept: Balances current needs with future considerations.
• Societal Marketing Concept: Considers the well-being of society in the long term.
• Sustainable Marketing Concept: Meeting current needs in a way that preserves the rights and options of future generations of consumers and businesses.

Social Criticisms of Marketing

Impact on Individual Consumers

• High prices:
  • Complaint: Prices are too high due to high costs of distribution, advertising and promotion, and excessive mark-ups.
  • Response: Intermediaries offer value, advertising informs buyers, and consumers may not fully understand the costs of doing business.
• Deceptive practices:
  • Complaint: Companies use deceptive pricing, promotion, and packaging.
  • Response: Support legislation to protect consumers; differentiate between deception, alluring imagery, and puffery.
• High-pressure selling:
  • Complaint: Salespeople use high-pressure tactics to persuade people to buy unwanted goods.
  • Response: Most selling involves building long-term relationships; high-pressure selling can damage relationships.
• Shoddy, harmful, or unsafe products:
  • Complaint: Products have poor quality, provide little benefit, and can be harmful.
  • Response: Good marketers avoid marketing such products.
• Planned obsolescence:
  • Complaint: Producers cause products to become obsolete.
  • Response: It is a result of a competitive market.
  • Example: Apple was accused of slowing down older iPhones via software updates to encourage upgrades.
• Poor service to disadvantaged consumers:
  • Complaint: Marketers serve disadvantaged customers poorly.
  • Response: Some marketers target these customers profitably, and the FTC takes action against those who don't.
• False wants and too much materialism:
  • Complaint: The marketing system promotes excessive interest in material possessions.
  • Response: People have defenses against advertising.
• Too few social goods:
  • Complaint: Businesses oversell private goods at the expense of public goods.
  • Response: Balance is needed between private and public goods.
• Cultural pollution:
  • Complaint: Marketing and advertising create cultural pollution.
  • Response: Marketing targets specific audiences, and consumers have alternatives.

Impact on Other Businesses

• Acquisition of competitors.
• Barriers to entry.
• Unfair competitive marketing practices.

Consumerism and Environmentalism

• Consumerism: Organized movement of citizens and government agencies to improve the rights and power of buyers in relation to sellers.

• Traditional Buyers’ Rights:

  • The right to not buy a product.
  • The right to expect the product to be safe.
  • The right to expect the product to perform as claimed.

• Consumerism Advocates Call For:

  • The right to be well informed.
  • The right to be protected against questionable products and marketing practices.
  • The right to influence products and marketing practices to improve the “quality of life”.
  • The right to consume now in a way that will preserve the world for future generations of consumers

• Environmentalism: Organized movement of concerned citizens, businesses, and government agencies to protect and improve people’s living environment.

• Environmental sustainability involves earning profits while helping to save the planet.

• Environmental Sustainability Includes:

  • Pollution prevention: Eliminating or minimizing waste before it is created.
  • Product stewardship: Minimizing pollution from production and throughout the product life cycle.
  • New clean technologies: Planning new technologies for competitive advantage.
  • Sustainability vision: A guide to the future, ensuring products, processes, and policies evolve.

Principles of Sustainable Marketing

• Consumer-Oriented Marketing.
• Customer-Value Marketing.
• Innovative Marketing.
• Sense-of-Mission Marketing.
• Societal Marketing.

Detailed Explanation of Sustainable Marketing Principles

• Consumer-Oriented Marketing: View marketing activities from the consumer's point of view and deliver superior value.
• Customer-Value Marketing: Invest in customer-value-building marketing; create value FOR customers.
• Innovative Marketing: Company seeks real product and marketing improvements.
• Sense-of-Mission Marketing: Define the mission in broad social terms rather than narrow product terms.

Marketing Ethics

• Corporate marketing ethics policies are broad guidelines that cover distributor relations, advertising standards, customer service, pricing, product development, and general ethical standards.
• Guidance: Should companies be guided by the free market and legal system, or by individual companies and managers?

The Sustainable Company

• Companies that fulfill the needs and wants of customers will thrive.
• Companies that harm customers, society, or future generations will decline.
• A sustainable company cares for the needs of today’s customers and shows concern for tomorrow’s customers and the broader world.