Sustainability Marketing

Answer

Sustainability Marketing

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) is an international independent, multi-stakeholder and non-profit organization that enhances environmental, economic and social sustainability. The GRI came up with guidelines that promote accountability, and transparency of the environmental, economic and social performance. The GRI guidelines stress the need for sustainability marketing. By definition, sustainability marketing refers to a method of building relationships with consumers while making them know that they are important stakeholders in the business. Although still developing, sustainability marketing is an essential piece of marketing strategy. It makes customers choose one company's product over the other. Various principles of sustainability marketing enables marketers to meet sustainability objectives while running a profitable organization. An organization with poor sustainability can easily fail.

With changes and dynamism in the field of marketing, marketers have realized the need to adopt more sustainable business practices. This helps in creating and maintaining good customer relationships. Generally, the principles of sustainability marketing are aimed at enhancing innovativeness, promoting customer and societal value while adhering to the mission, vision, and objectives of the company (Kılıç,  & Özdemir, 2015). Therefore, sustainability marketing provides a road map for the creation and provision of customer-oriented goods and services. A good marketing plan must be customer-oriented, societal and promote innovation. The major principles of marketing sustainability include 

• Consumer-oriented marketing: This principle outlines that marketers should organize their activities from the consumers' point of view.
• Customer value marketing: It focuses on the need of the organization to focus its resources on marketing investments that promote customers' values. It stresses that an organization should provide value to the customers, promote long-run consumer loyalty, value creation and capturing of value from consumers.
• Innovative marketing: The principle suggests that an organization should seek improvement. It involves coming up with new techniques to diminish the cost of production or developing new technologies that can improve the products.
• Sense of mission marketing: It focuses on the importance of an organization to define its mission in broad social terms rather than concentrating on product terms
• Societal marketing: This principle suggests that a firm should consider, the industry, society and consumer interests.

There a lot of surprising, interesting and challenging things about marketing sustainability. One of the most surprising things in marketing sustainability is planning. Before coming up with marketing sustainability goals, marketers must design a sustainability plan. The plan is a roadmap for all marketing activities. Lack of good planning can hinder an organization from reaching its sustainability goals. The most interesting thing about sustainability marketing is the aspect of culture. Culture has dictates and impacts how goods and services are marketed. Good marketers must understand the culture of the targeted consumers. Culture includes the values, norms, ethics, and beliefs of people in society. Marketers cannot develop marketing strategies that are against the consumer and the community's beliefs. Achieving marketing sustainability is a big challenge. After going through the coursework, I believe that the most challenging thing is to persuade consumers to change their sustainable behavior. Some consumers are so tough on culture and what they believe in. therefore, changing or imparting a new sustainability aspect may be very difficult.

In one word, although achieving marketing sustainability remains a challenge, sustainability is an essential global reporting initiative. It makes organizations get big profits by enhancing sustainability marketing principles.