Some Considerations regarding the Ecological Sustainability of Marketing
Systems
Anja Schaefer
Open University Business School
Sustainable development is perhaps the most significant and yet the most difficult
problem that marketing – and human economic activity in general – face at the
beginning of the third millennium. The paper starts by charting the state of affairs for
marketing and sustainability so far. It then uses the analogy of a living system to
explore the requirements for a sustainable marketing system and barriers to
sustainability. Proponents of living systems theory argue that a systemic
understanding of life can be extended to the social domain and social systems can be
considered as living, autopoietic systems, with self-regulatory functions that allow
them to adapt to environmental change. A sustainable marketing system would have
to be flexible, decentralised, and open to learning from environmental cues.
Experiments to deal with these environmental changes would emerge in various forms
and at various places and multiple feedback loops would help to identify viable
solutions and spread them. However, there seem to be continuing barriers to such
changes that would make the marketing system as a whole more sustainable. The
biggest of these barriers may be the requirement for growth in a capitalist economic
system. This obstacle is discussed in the final part of the paper.
Introduction
Sustainable development can be called, without undue exaggeration, the most
significant and yet the most difficult problem that marketing – and human economic
activity in general – face at the beginning of the third millennium (WCED, 1987;
Ottman, 1993; OECD, 1998; Diamond, 2005). Modern production methods and
marketing systems have brought unparalleled material comforts to most people in
affluent societies, to many in the so-called emerging economies, as well as to a few in
less developed societies. In this sense affluent consumers have never had it so good.
But this level of material wealth has come at a high price as increasingly the earth’s
natural resources are seen to be under enormous stress, the most significant example
of which is perhaps global climate change (Throop et al., 1993; Stead & Stead, 1994)
This is one global environmental problem that can be directly linked not only to the
production of material goods but also to their consumption, where – to give just one
example – an increasing number of people travel more frequently and for longer
distances, using motorcars, airplanes and other forms of motorised transport, all of
which use increasing amounts of fossil fuels. Making marketing – and production,
consumption and everything else that goes with it – more ecologically sustainable is
therefore one of the big challenges ahead.
The Promises and Trials of Green Marketing
Conventional marketing practice, what might be called ‘brown’ marketing, has been
criticised for its lack of ecological sustainability. The key points of criticism are that it
promotes excessive consumption and materialism, and that product design is often
environmentally wasteful due to short durability of products, products not being
designed for recycling and excessive material use. No part of the marketing chain is
without criticism. Excessive packaging, production of marketing materials and the
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transportation of finished goods often over long distances are all criticised as being
wasteful of resource (Velasquez, 2002). In this sense, marketing and environmental
sustainability are often seen as directly opposed and the very notion of sustainable
marketing as an oxymoron.
According to the marketing concept as presented in widely used marketing texts,
“achieving organisational goals depends on determining the needs and wants of target
markets and delivering the desired satisfactions” (Kotler et al., 2001, p.15). Defenders
of marketing practice might therefore argue that it is unfair to lay all these
environmental woes at the door of marketing as marketing does not create consumer
needs – even those in an overly materialistic society – but merely reflects them.
Therefore, if consumers were not willing to buy all these products offered in the
market and happily accept or demand ever more and new consumer goods no amount
of advertising or other marketing techniques could ever make them do so. There is
some element of truth in this argument. Without latent consumer interest and demand
no new product will succeed, no matter how sophisticated the selling techniques, and
the large number of failed products in the history of marketing amply testifies to this
effect. However, protesting that marketing merely respondents to consumer demands
would also be somewhat disingenuous. Even entry- level marketing textbooks
acknowledge that many situations “call for customer-driving marketing –
understanding customer needs even better than customers themselves do, and creating
products and services that will meet existing and latent needs” (Kotler et al., 2001, p.
16). A look at actual marketing practice will suggest a similar conclusion. If
marketing techniques, including advertising, do not actually have the potential to
suggest new needs to consumers, to charm and seduce them, and thus if not create at
least nourish their materialist wishes, then it is difficult to see why consumer goods
companies would spend quite as much money on advertising that seems so obviously
designed to do just that. At the very least it would seem true to say that marketing
practice and consumer demand encourage and feed off each other in a circle of mutual
influence and dependence.
‘Green’ Marketing has been proposed as a solution, at least a partial one, to the
environmental issues connected with conventional marketing. The premise here
follows ecological modernisation thought, i.e. that transformation towards an
environmentally sustainable economy can be achieved within the current market
system (Young, 2000, Mol & Spaargaren, 2000). The logic here is that there is a
rising consumer awareness of and concern about environmental issues. Consumers
therefore demand more environmentally responsible products and production
processes. Marketers react flexibly to these consumer demands, changing products
and processes to achieve the same consumer benefits with less environmental
detriment. Marketers that do not respond to these market demands are perceived to be
environmentally irresponsible by consumers and are eventually pushed out of a
competitive market. This process constitutes a rebuilding of a more sustainable
market system from below, whereby a snowball effect of demand for more
environmentally benign products and processes and increased monitoring at all levels
drives pro-environmental change through the entire supply chain. This view of green
marketing, albeit not always quite as simplistically as presented here, can be found in
a fair proportion of the ‘green’ marketing literature (e.g. Balderjahn, 1988; Ottman,
1993; Peattie, 1995; Roberts, 1996; Fuller, 1999).
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This optimistic view of green marketing has been criticised by a number of scholars
over recent years. According to Kilbourne (1998) the environmental crisis rests not
within specific behaviour, such as the purchase of particular, non-green products, but
within a materialist ‘dominant social paradigm’ that is reflected in our entire
production and consumption systems. Contemporary green marketing fails to move
beyond that paradigm and is therefore unable to provide a solution to the crisis.
Likewise, Smith (1998) argues that green marketing is a myth, designed to prop up an
unsustainable industrial system rather than to overcome or change it fundamentally.
At most it can provide a “band-aid” to a problem which requires much more serious
solutions. Welford (1997) even argues that all the talk about greener management
only serves to mask business as usual behind the scenes and that business has
‘hijacked’ environmentalism for its own ends. In a somewhat different, albeit
compatible vein, Meriläinen (2000) suggests that accepted green marketing thought
and practice is still based on male viewpoints of domination and subjugatio n of nature
and society and hence not conducive to sustainability. In only partial contrast to these
sceptical voices, Prothero and Fitchett (2000) seem to suggest that consumer culture
could be used to further environmental goals through the provision of green
commodities by marketers but that such a use of consumer culture would require far
reaching revisions to prevailing paradigms regarding the structure, nature and
characteristics of capitalism.
If all is not well with green marketing from a conceptua l viewpoint, problems also
arise with the spread of green marketing practice. The greening of marketing has been
found to be more rhetoric than substance (Peattie, 1999). The economic rationale for
green marketing is being questioned, suggesting perhaps a backlash against what
seemed like a green marketing bandwagon in the early 1990s. It has been suggested
that corporate concern with environmental issues is often not well received by
investors (Mathur & Mathur, 2000) that green products are perceived to have failed to
deliver market performance, leading to some retrenchment by companies (Crane,
2000).
Yet, while green marketing as practiced by industry has come in for criticism as being
either insufficient given the magnitude and nature of the problem or even just a
cynical self-preservation exercise, marketing holds out another promise in delivering
change towards greater ecological sustainability. Social marketing means the use of
marketing techniques to promote socially desirable behaviours (Kotler & Zaltman,
1971; Andreasen, 1995), including environmental awareness and more sustainable
behaviours. It attempts to re-educate and persuade consumers not to consume certain
goods at all or to a much-reduced extent. This idea is related to the concept of demarketing (Kotler & Levy, 1971). Environmental marketing in this sense is more
likely to be used by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and government and its
agencies than by private sector companies although the latter sometimes resort to demarketing whe n they are unable to meet demand. In theory, marketing techniques
used in this way could be very helpful in changing materialist attitudes and
behaviours although achieving this goal may require some modification to current
marketing theory that is focused on commercial practice (Peattie & Peattie, 2003).
However, in practice social marketing still has to make its mark in promoting greater
sustainability. Governments often make at best only half- hearted attempts to curb
consumption as they fear negative consequences for the economy and hence their
chances of being re-elected. Those attempts that have been made have often been
3
hampered by inappropriate stimulus-response models of consumer behaviour that fail
to capture accurately the nature of affluent contemporary consumption (Cohen, 2001).
The fact that the marketing budgets of government and NGOs are usually far
outstripped by those of corporations adds another problem.
Conceptualising a Sustainable Marketing System
Although the activities of individual firms and consumers are, obviously, highly
important it may be equally or perhaps even more instructive to take a look at
marketing as a subsystem of the economic system and ask ourselves what a
sustainable marketing system might look like. The theory of living systems can be
used fruitfully to conceptualise social systems (Miller, 1978), particularly with respect
to ecological sustainability (Capra, 2003) and may help us to understand how a
sustainable marketing system might work. Proponents of living systems theory argue
that a systemic understanding of life can be extended to the social domain and social
systems be considered as living, autopoietic systems, with self- regulatory functions
that allow them to adapt to environmental change. Over the years, some attempts have
been made to use systems theory in organisational studies. For instance, the Academy
of Management Journal dedicated an issue to systems theoretic approaches in 1972,
and Administrative Science Quarterly did so in 1996. However, it is claimed that the
systems approach has not been used extensively (Ashmos & Huber, 1987; Stern &
Barley, 1996) even though the potential usefulness of general systems theory (Kast &
Rosenzweig, 1972) and living systems theory (Ashmos & Huber, 1987) to the
understanding of organizations has been described as significant. In the marketing
field, Reidenbach and Oliva (1981) suggested an application of general living systems
theory to the study of marketing activities within an organization. There is also a
growing interest in the relationship of marketing with wider social systems in the
emerging macro- marketing literature but it is probably fair to say that systemic views
have so far been relatively rare in the field.
The discussion in this section builds mostly on Capra’s (2003) conceptualisation of
living systems. Building, among others, on the work of Maturana and Varela (1987)
in biology, and Luhmann (1990) in social science, Capra (2003) defines living
systems as self- generating (autopoietic) networks where the function of each
component is to transform or replace other components, so that the entire network
continually (re-)generates itself. In this way living networks undergo continual
structural changes while preserving their web- like patterns of organization. Basic
living structures, such as cells, exist far from thermodynamic equilibrium and would
soon decay towards equilibrium (i.e. they would die) if they did not use a continual
flow of energy to restore structures as fast as they are decaying. Living systems are
therefore organisationally closed but materially and energetically open. They are
created through non- linear dynamics with multiple feedback loops and change occurs
through emergence rather than transformation.
Capra identifies three aspects of living systems: pattern, structure and process. The
pattern of organization (or form) of a living system is the configuration of
relationships among the system’s components that determines the system’s essential
characteristics. The structure of the system (or matter) is the material embodiment of
its pattern of organization. The life process is the continual process of this
embodiment. In social systems (in contrast to living systems) there is a fourth aspect:
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meaning, which refers to the inner world of reflective consciousness. These aspects
are depicted as a four-dimensional basic model of a living social system in Figure 1.
Meaning
Process
Structure
Matter
Figure 1: Living Social System, Source: Capra (2003, p. 64)
For instance, culture is created and sustained by a network (form) of communications
(process), in which meaning is generated. The culture’s material embodiments
(matter) include artefacts and written texts, through which meaning is passed on from
generation to generation. Unlike biology, where all structures are material, culture has
semantic as well as material structures. Culture arises from a complex, highly nonlinear dynamic with multiple feedback loops. Power is highly important in the
emergence of social structures. Power enables the emergence of meaning but can also
be misused for furthering particular interests that may not sustain culture as a whole.
Following the model of biological living systems, Capra (2003) argues that the form
of a sustainable, living social system would be a relatively decentralised and open
network. Only such openness and flexibility would enable the network to learn from
and react constructively to changes in its environment. Looking at organizations, he
suggests that understanding an organizations as a living systems, rather than a
machine, would induce managers to rely less on top-down command approaches to
change and more on the learning capacity of living communities of practice, which
form the informal structure of an organisation. Living networks change by responding
to disturbances in accordance with how meaningful they are to individuals in the
network. Novelty is then not imposed on the system but emerges at critical points of
instability that arise from fluctuations in the environment, amplified by feedback
loops. Such novelty is not planned or designed and thus unpredictable. For systems to
change and novelty to emerge the system needs to be relatively open and willing to be
disturbed in the first place, and there has to be an active network of communications
with multiple feedback loops to amplify the triggering event. While Capra argues that
business organizations are often quite rigid and hierarchical and not particularly open
to change, we could argue that the marketing system as a whole actually exhibits
some of the decentralised, flexible characteristics of living systems and might thus be
more amenable to the emergence of novelty in response to environmental triggers, for
instance those related to an unfolding ecological crisis.
Let us now look at the four aspects of living social systems in turn. In terms of the
form of the system we might identify the following players: (1) business firms
(suppliers of raw materials and parts, manufacturers of finished industrial and
consumer goods, intermediaries, industrial customers); (2) consumers;
(3)
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government and intergovernmental organisations; (4) NGOs, to name the most
obvious. In principle, there seems to be nothing in the form of the current system - at
least where democracy prevails - that suggests that it should not be open and
amenable to learning and change. Indeed, such openness and flexibility should be the
hallmark of a free market based economic system. However, it is well known that
capitalist market systems are often rather less free and open than classical economic
theory would posit as desirable and some firms may possess significant market power
and thus the ability to stop new entrants and inhibit change. A further problem is that
constituents within the system may be le ss open and flexible. Business and
government organisations are generally structured along more hierarchical lines,
which may be rather less conducive to learning. Power structures are in place in any
social system and fulfil an important role in maintaining some order and stability but
they also uphold vested interests and may impede learning that does not start with
and/or does not immediately seem to suit those powerful interests.
Processes are the next important element in a living social system and include
communication and material processes. For the marketing system communications
would not just include ‘marketing communications’ but also the other elements of the
marketing mix, consumer behaviour, and communications by governments and
NGOs. Material processes include the extraction and conversion of raw materials,
transportation, use of finished goods, and disposal. Both of these can be seen as
problematic from an ecological sustainability perspective. Current material processes
are problematic because of their ‘linear’ rather than ‘cyclical’ nature and
communications are problematic because of the meaning conveyed, which is often a
promotion of material consumption and valuing material over non- material benefits.
On a perhaps somewhat minor scale, communications may also be problematic
because of the material use that is part of marketing communications.
Meaning, invested in and communicated by the other three elements in the model, is
the important element that distinguishes social systems from biological living
systems. Marketing networks communicate meaning in terms of values, technological
knowledge, commercial knowledge, among others. On the one hand, marketing
systems could therefore be well suited to the transfer of sustainable technologies, as
has been suggested by Fisk (1998). On the other hand, the specific values and the type
of commercial knowledge that is communicated in contemporary marketing systems
may well be a key problem from a sustainability perspective. Making money is often
thought to override all other values, particularly in global financial markets (Capra,
2003), and the dominant social paradigm seems characterised by materialism and
profit-making (Kilbourne, 1998).
Finally, let us consider the way in which matter is being used and transformed in the
current marketing system. Material artefacts are often, perhaps even predominantly
produced in an ecologically and socially unsustainable way and, as we have argued
above, current green marketing practices do not seem to change this unsustainable
production significantly. There are many arguments that the technologies for radically
more efficient materials use are being developed and perhaps even on the brink of
commercial viability. Factor 4 or even Factor 10 reductions in material use for similar
consumer benefits are thought by some to be technologically perfectly feasible (von
Weizsäcker et al., 1997). However, such purely technological solutions tend not to
6
take into account social conditions and, in any case, the mainstream of the marketing
system seems rather slow in taking them up on a large scale.
From this discussion, it seems that a sustainable marketing system would have to be
flexible, decentralised, and open to learning from environmental cues, such as
emerging evidence of impending raw material shortages, observable environmental
changes with respect to forest cover, soil fertility, air and water quality and less
readily observable global environmental changes, such as climate change.
Experiments to deal with these environmental changes would emerge in various forms
and at various places and multiple feedback loops would help to identify viable
solutions and spread them.
However, currently there seem to be continuing barriers to such changes that would
make the marketing system as a whole more sustainable. It may be that the signals
from the environment are simply not strong enough, yet, for new solutions to emerge
and that the marketing system will indeed react in the open and flexible manner of a
living system if these signals become more clearly felt. Yet, there are also rigidities in
the system that may inhibit such flexible learning. Societal values are an obvious
culprit and have been identified as such by a number of authors (e.g. Kilbourne,
1998). In affluent societies there are perhaps some signs of a change in values, with
more people being concerned about ecological degradation and disillusioned with the
perceived stresses and emptiness of a materialistic life-style (Ottman, 1993; Peattie,
1995; Minton & Rose, 1997; Roberts & Bacon, 1997) and that some even voluntarily
seek simpler life-styles involving less material consumption (Rudmin & Kilbourne,
1996; Iwata, 1997). The question is whether a sufficiently large number of people are
re-thinking their values (or may do so in the future) to form a critical mass for change.
On the other hand, value changes away from material and financial accumulation of
wealth seem to be happening rather slowly in business and government circles at
present. Structural rigidities in large business and government organisations,
connected to vested interests and rigid power structures, are a further, significant
barrier to change.
The Thorny Problem of Growth
The biggest rigidity that impedes flexible learning from environmental cues, and thus
a marketing system which contributes rather than hinders long-term ecological
sustainbility, is perhaps to be found in the imperative of economic growth that is
inherent to a capitalist system. Classical and neo-classical economics would suggest
that the reaction of an open and flexible capitalist system to negative ecological
signals could indeed include retraction and a focus on less material intensive
processes. However, Keynesian economics (Keynes, 1936) would suggest a much
more forceful connection between modern capitalism and growth. In this view, zeroor even negative growth may not be possible in modern capitalism without leading to
crisis.
The central issue in this argument is the role of money and four principles underlying
the borrowing and saving of money and investment: (1) companies will only invest if
they can expect profits from this investment; (2) in order to invest companies
normally need to borrow money, money which they will have to re-pay with interest
at a later date; (3) in a closed capitalist system total capital corresponds to total debt;
and (4) money is generated from credit, in fact it is credit (Binswanger & von Flotow,
7
1994). If a single company borrows £ 100 in order to produce, say, cloth, it will have
to re-pay those £100 plus interest after the loan period. Even if the recipients of those
£100 (workers, wool merchants, etc.) use the entire sum to buy cloth from the same
company, the company will not make enough money to pay the interest. In order for
the whole system to work, other enterprises need to borrow money, invest and pay
wages, etc., which can then be used for consumption (von Heusinger, 2004).
The fundamental principle in this view of capitalist economics is that in each period
of time there has to be someone who is prepared to borrow money to invest, so that
income for all companies rises in such a way that they can pay their interest and make
a profit. The requirement for growth is built into the system and it is interests that
produce the dynamic that is called growth. When there is no growth, capitalism will
inevitably be plunged into crisis. According to this argument, the only way in which
zero- or negative growth would not lead to an economic crisis is if lenders were to
reduce, i.e. spend their capital. But such a voluntary reduction of capital held has
never happened in capitalism unless in times of war, when private capital has been
appropriated by the state, or in times of depression (von Heusinger, 2004).
If the capitalist system is indeed built on growth, serious implications for the question
of ecological sustainability arise. The requirement for growth may also explain the
key rigidities in the marketing systems that prevent a change towards greater
sustainability. If growth is a vital factor in modern capitalist economies the role of
marketing has to be to fuel that growth, i.e. to induce people to consume and spend
more. Promoting materialist values would almost inevitably seem to be part of this
role. The necessity for growth is not necessarily a problem if it is assumed that
economic growth can somehow be de-coupled from increased material use, that is if
we believe, like von Weizsäcker et al. (1997), that technological progress can and will
lead to a radical de-materialisation of production and consumption if only the social
barriers to the further development and full deployment of such technology can be
removed (and the marketing system learn and evolve in this way without questioning
the central tenets of capitalism).
However, radical dematerialisation of economic growth does not seem to be
happening, with new growth of consumer good production outstripping many gains in
material efficiency even in relatively slower growing industrialised countries and
certainly in newly industrialising societies, such as China. On the one hand, the fact
that there is currently no such decoupling of growth and material consumption may
indeed be because of rigidities in the world markets, with newly industrialising
countries employing older, more polluting and inefficient technologies. Removing the
barriers to full use of more efficient technologies might therefore indeed solve many
environmental problems. Whether even Factor 4 or 10 would be enough to make up
for the additional material growth associated with rapid economic development in
many countries, some with a population as large as China, as well as continuing rapid
population growth in many other countries remains however doubtful even if
structural and social barriers to the full deployment of radically more efficient
technologies could be removed. Some residual unease about technological solutions
to current environmental problems also remains. New technologies generally turn out
to have undesirable and unforeseen effects as well as desirable and foreseen ones and
this author remains doubtful that – new – technology will solve the problems that –
old – technology created in the first place.
8
Yet, an absence of radical dematerialisation of production and consumption coupled
with a need for economic growth built into the current capitalist economic system
constitute a very serious rigidity in terms of living systems theory as outlined above.
As we saw, living systems need to be open and flexible in order to self-regulate in
response to cues for cha nge. A system that needs to grow by definition crucially lacks
this flexibility as any response other than growth is incompatible with the
maintenance of the system in even approximately its present form. Such a response
will therefore be resisted by nearly all the system’s powerful constituents for fear of
the potential chaos and disorder that could result. If the potential to react flexibly to
cues is a crucial element of a functioning living system and if the flexibility to react in
one particular way, at least, is considered highly undesirable by most powerful (and
not so powerful) constituents of the system, this lack of flexibility seriously hampers
the capability of the system for regeneration and would put its long term sustainability
into question.
Conclusion
In this paper I have tried to chart the development of green marketing and its
limitations and to show what the implications of living systems theory for a
sustainable marketing system would be. Flexibility and openness to environmental
triggers and an ability to learn through networks of information and practice so that
novel solutions can emerge seem crucial for a sustainable living system. The
marketing systems would seem to show some characteristics of an open, living
system, in that would seem to have a fairly open and flexible form, at least in
principle, with numerous feedback loops, that should make it fairly amenable to
learning and emergence of new solutions. I have also identified a number of rigidities,
for instance in the much more hierarchical and inflexible form of most organizations
that make up a large part of the system. The dominant meanings conveyed within the
system, in particular materialistic and short-term values, may also mean that the
system as a whole is not very receptive to triggers that speak of an environmental
crisis and the need for radical changes to production and consumption. In particular, I
have tried to show that a requirement for growth inherent in capitalism may make the
whole system unsustainable.
What does this argument mean for the sustainability of marketing? The marketing
system as we know it is first and foremost a subsystem of the capitalist system and
has an important function in supporting this capitalist suprasystem. As such, if
capitalism turns out to be unsustainable, the marketing system will turn out to be
unsustainable. However, that need not necessarily mean that all forms of marketing
are unsustainable. Markets can exist outside capitalism, for instance in the form of
social markets, as devised in post-war Germany (although perhaps no longer fully
functional), or even market socialism, which has never been tried but is conceivable
(see Chryssides & Kaler, 1993 for a discussion of different forms of markets and their
implications for business ethics). Capital accumulation does not seem to be a
necessary precondition for the working of markets. Marketing, understood either as
the process of exchange relationships in a market or as a set of techniques, which may
apply to commercial transactions as well as social ones, would then not depend on the
existence of a capitalist system, either. In that sense, we could envisage sustainable
marketing that is not part of a capitalist system. Whether or not such a system is likely
9
to emerge (particularly without major crises and upheavals) is however not clear and
perhaps rather doubtful.
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