Sustainable marketing

If you haven't heard about sustainable marketing, you will--and soon. It's attracted more attention, especially in Europe, in the past year.

Definitions vary, but basically, sustainable marketing is intended to meet the needs of customers and the organization while protecting the natural environment (and, in fact, supporting sustainability on a number of levels).

Clearly, sustainable marketing is essential for eco-tourism, for instance: unless the marketing effort is an asset to the preservation of the local ecology, tourists will stop coming because the destination will lose the unspoiled atmosphere that made it so appealing in the first place. In other words, sustainable marketing is a kind of balancing act.

Here are links to three recent company reports on sustainability:

SABMiller BP Vivendi

And two links to more information about sustainable marketing:

Smart: Know-Net (practical information about many topics, including sustainability in product marketing, etc.)

Patrick E. Murphy (academic overview of the history of sustainable marketing by a professor at Mendoza College of Business at the University of Notre Dame)