What is sustainable marketing? A complete guide

By Ketul

Updated 21 Jan, 2025

15 min read

At its core, sustainable marketing is about doing business in a way that supports long-term value for people, the planet, and profit.

It’s not about quick wins or short-term profits, but about building a system where all parts work together harmoniously—much like a healthy ecosystem.

While traditional marketing often focuses solely on profit, sustainable marketing seeks to balance profitability with ethical practices that benefit society and the environment. This means creating strategies that minimize harm, reduce waste, and foster authentic, long-lasting relationships with your audience. In a world where consumers are increasingly aware of their choices, sustainable marketing has evolved from being a trend to a crucial strategy.

What is Sustainability?

The concept of sustainability has been defined in many ways but one of the most commonly used definitions is from the UN’s 1987 Brundtland Report, which states that ”sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This definition was then reframed by John Elkington as the ”triple bottom line” of sustainability, which includes environmental protection, social responsibility, and economic growth. The term triple bottom line references how companies should focus on more than just the singular bottom line (profit), but also on additional bottom lines such as people and the planet.

The Triple Bottom Line: People, Planet, and Profit

At the heart of sustainable marketing are the 3 Ps—People, Planet, and Profit. Here’s how they guide sustainable business strategies:

People: Sustainable marketing is centered on people. It’s about understanding your audience and creating products and services that meet consumer needs and contribute positively to society. By prioritizing people, companies foster loyalty and build communities that support long-term growth.
Planet: Environmental responsibility isn’t just a checkbox; it’s vital for businesses aiming to make a lasting impact. This could mean reducing carbon footprints, using eco-friendly packaging, or creating content with digital tools and AI to minimize waste. When businesses prioritize the planet, they signal a commitment to protecting and regenerating resources, ensuring that growth does not come at the planet’s expense.
Profit: Focusing on people and the planet doesn’t mean compromising profit. Sustainable marketing generates long-term profitability by aligning purpose with financial success. By cultivating trust, reducing costs, and reinforcing brand values, companies can achieve sustainable growth that benefits all stakeholders.

Authenticity - a core element of Sustainable Marketing

Another core element of sustainable marketing is authenticity. It’s not about putting a green label on a product and calling it “eco-friendly.” It’s about transparency, delivering on promises, and inviting consumers into a shared mission of making the world a better place. Authentic marketing requires consistent, honest storytelling that aligns with company values. Authenticity builds trust, and trust builds enduring relationships. Sustainable marketing invites customers into an ecosystem where they are valued, supported, and heard.

3 Pillars of Sustainable Marketing

Even the most sophisticated marketing campaigns can’t succeed if a company lacks sincere consideration of environmental and social concerns in its corporate strategy.

Environmental responsibility: this pillar focuses on reducing negative environmental impacts through the use of eco-friendly materials, energy-efficient processes, and waste reduction.
Social responsibility: this pillar centers on ethical business practices, fair labor conditions, and supporting community initiatives.
Economic viability: this pillar strives for a balance between profitability and sustainable practices, ensuring long-term economic growth without exploiting resources.

Sustainable Marketing Impacts & Opportunities

Marketers must understand that current practices contribute to negative outcomes. The sustainable marketing practice we need will take accountability for its areas of impact and opportunity in different ways:

Financial
Physical
Psychological, sociological and cultural; and
Ethical

These areas are further explored below:

1. Financial impact and opportunity

The continued growth of an economic system that is only financially-focused will destroy its environment and the living things that depend on it. To transform the economy, one must transform the market and the marketing driving it.

With the urgent need for new economic thinking comes the urgent need for marketing professionals to advocate and demonstrate new leadership on profit and growth via a purpose-first approach to marketing and business activity. Purpose-first growth positions profit as a means rather than an end, in service of a purpose that is targeted at directly delivering a positive contribution to society.

Sustainable marketing takes responsibility for the influential role it can play in driving businesses and clients to rewire the economy. This involves:

Embracing and embedding new ways of thinking about profit
Influencing and achieving organisational purpose
Measuring what matters and setting the right targets for social and environmental progress
Driving innovation in offerings that will serve society, and
Mobilising stakeholders to support sustainable business practices.

2. Physical impact and opportunity

The term ‘marketing footprint’ refers to the physical real-world impact that marketing strategies, decisions and operations have on our collective long-term wellbeing and the social and environmental systems that underpin it. Physical real-world impacts include the likes of emissions, waste, pollution, land degradation, loss of habitats and species, human health and equality.

Sustainable marketing uses its position of key influence, at the intersection of business and society, to drive positive change across production and consumption to protect and restore the health of social and environmental systems. It takes appropriate accountability for the impact and opportunity of its direct operational footprint (generated via campaigns, production, events, etc) and theindirect supply-side (production) and demand-side (consumption) footprints that it influences. This involves:

Gaining and maintaining an understanding of systems health and marketing’s contribution to it
Building the achievement of sustainability into strategic thinking, planning and execution
Engaging in the methodology and technology available to account for marketing’s direct footprint
Supporting the innovation working to close gaps in industry-wide footprint accounting
Ensuring appropriate responsibility is taken for marketing’s indirect footprint; and
Accepting the leadership role that marketing has in creating positive change in production and consumption.

3. Psychological, sociological and cultural impact and opportunity

Marketing shapes our perception of what is valuable and aspirational and influences our individual and collective values, worldviews, identities and lifestyles. Through this, marketing influences what is normal and desirable for individuals and groups in the cultures and societies where it is active.

This effect is known as ‘marketing’s brainprint’. It transcends the business system and enters society, through brands, and via the likes of advertising, entertainment, publishing, production, product design and what is and is not broadcast and reported.

Every time marketing, media and creative professionals make a strategic or creative decision, they have the opportunity to re-enforce sustainable or unsustainable behaviours, norms and the values that underpin them. The marketing practice we need requires active acknowledgement of the psychological, sociological and cultural impacts of marketing and creative activity, and ensures this influence and opportunity is aligned with sustainable outcomes. This involves:

Developing and delivering narratives that are aligned with sustainable ends
Using the power of creativity in service of sustainability
Influencing attitudes, beliefs, norms and behaviours that are aligned with a sustainable future
Helping us individually and collectively align what we perceive to be valuable, aspirational and desirable with sustainable outcomes for all living things; and
Embedding sustainability in our culture and society.

4. Ethical impact and opportunity

While often unintentional, the consequence of misinformation, greenwashing and purpose-washing can scale from being marginally to critically devastating depending on the associated footprint and brainprint. Beyond increasing awareness, adoption and share-of-voice for unsuitable goods and services, it reduces the understanding, trust and action needed across society. Green or purpose-hushing can be equally damaging at a time when transparent, truthful and transformational brand advocacy and business-led change are needed.

Transparent, accurate and evidenced communication is needed through every available medium to guide and encourage movements across business and society to address the complex and interwoven challenges that undermine the collective wellbeing of people, nature and our climate. This involves:

Aligning marketing objectives with the social moral landscape
Leading proactively for the behavioural change needed and healing the issues marketing has created in the past
Ensuring marketing claims adhere to the latest legislation, regulation and standards and are therefore truthful, meaningful, transparent, clear, substantiated and considerate of the full product lifecycle
Using the necessary, most relevant and credible standards, certifications and accreditations available to endorse, substantiate and support marketing and brandwork
Engaging with track and trace technology when and where appropriate
Maintaining marketing’s creativity while adhering to moral codes and frameworks; and
Collaborating to evolve these frameworks, learning from peers and experts.

Benefits of Sustainable Marketing

Attracting customers, especially millennials and the up-and-coming Gen Z consumer. Gen Z prefer sustainable brands and are willing to spend more on sustainable products, studies show.
Attracting and retaining employees. Younger workers want to work for companies that share their concern for climate change and social justice.
Improving brand reputation.

Examples of Sustainable Marketing

There are a number of approaches businesses could take to becoming more sustainable, such as:

1. Donating profits to sustainable causes
2. Sourcing sustainable materials and/or packaging
3. Creating a product that contributes to sustainable living

Donating profits to sustainable causes

Sustainable commerce leaders, Patagonia, have pledged 15 of sales to the preservation and restoration of the natural environment since 1985. In 2022, that means a total of $140 million so far. They have also set an aim to be completely carbon neutral by 2025.

Sourcing sustainable materials and/or packaging

Household cleaning products manufacturer, BornGood, creates cleaning products that are safe for the planet and users both, prioritising plastic neutrality and reducing water pollution. Showing the importance of keeping your products relevant, BornGood strongly suggests that you only buy their bottle once and thereafter refill the same bottle!

Creating a product that contributes to sustainable living

Another approach would be to create a business which is completely centered around sustainability, such as Sankalptaru, an IT-enabled, environmentally-focused NGO. Their initiatives encompass afforestation, ecosystem restoration, water conservation projects, awareness sessions, and nutrition programs, all aimed at combating climate change and fostering sustainable communities.

Sankalptaru enables individuals and businesses to gift/sponsor trees and provides an interface where receivers can view a personalized platform about their tree.

The 3 key aspects of Sustainable Marketing

As with any brand initiative, companies need to consider the context of the issue they are tapping into, and how/why their brand fits as a solution in the mind of the customer. Of course, they also have to define their goals, both in terms of sustainable action and the impact it has on the brand, so that their progress can be measured and celebrated.

The 3 key aspects of sustainable marketing are:

1. The plan is long-term

Social and environmental issues are extremely large and need to be tackled on a larger time frame than seasonal promotions. For eg, LEGO’s mission is to have the production of its LEGO bricks be fully sustainable by 2030. This was announced at the end of 2018, meaning this is a 12-year plan.

2. The plan is consistent

It is easy to tell customers that one aspect of the brand is eco-friendly, but what about other elements? For example, imagine your brand sells a drink and you switch to new ingredients that are sustainably sourced. But are the bottles you sell that drink in, recyclable? What about the labels used on the bottle? Such a problem was brought to light when McDonald’s replaced its plastic straws with paper ones. Due to the thickness of the new straws, the company said that they were not yet easily processed and recycled by the company’s waste solution providers, so they should be put in the general waste. The story soon broke in the press:

Even though the makers of the straws, Transcend Packaging, issued a statement clarifying that the straws themselves were recyclable, which story do you think received the most attention and discussion on social media?

3. The strategy is fully integrated across the business

A sustainable marketing strategy is only as strong as the marketing plan behind it. At the very minimum, a company should keep the following in mind:

Research how competitors are employing sustainable marketing
Audit their customer journey to make sure sustainable messages come through in a sensible and appropriate way at each stage in the marketing funnel.
Cross-reference key messages in other campaigns and always-on activity to ensure consistency.
Brief staff and stakeholders (particularly marketing, sales, and product) on the sustainability messages and where to find the key information.
Continue to check and scan the environmental landscape, and be prepared to make changes.

Greenwashing alert

However, values such as sustainability and social responsibility can only be effectively communicated outward if they are actively lived by the company.

Consumers quickly recognize greenwashing and empty promises. Here are some revealing statistics:

According to a recent Deloitte study, not even half of the millennials surveyed (47%) believe that business has a positive impact on society, despite all the advertising images and corporate initiatives.
More than two-thirds (69%) criticize companies for looking solely after their own interests.
6 out of 10 of people born after 2000 assume that profit maximization is the sole corporate goal.

Key takeaway

The essence of sustainable marketing is that companies position their brands as active figures in an environmental or societal issue. It can humanize the brand messages and create another reason why customers should choose them over their competition.

But we should not underestimate the commitment needed to participate in sustainable initiatives. These aren’t simple ‘buzzwords’ or ‘hot topics’ – they are programs dedicated to reducing carbon emissions, increasing recyclable materials, and improving prospects for the next generation.

The main question is – is the brand willing to put its money where its mouth is?

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