How has marketing strategy research focused on sustainability changed over time? This is an important question for researchers that also matters for those who use academic research but aren’t academics themselves. (Often there are not as many of these non-academic users of research as we’d like but one can always hope). To better understand marketing strategy research a group of us recently published a piece mapping corporate sustainability research.
Mapping Corporate Sustainability Research
A common way to look at sustainability is to describe it as relating to environmental, social, and economic issues. This is the division from John Elkington’s Triple Bottom Line, see here. Of course, there is considerable overlap — cutting air pollution is an environmental win but it also helps address social issues as disadvantaged members of the community often suffer most from poor air quality. Yet, we thought it would be helpful to try and understand the main focuses of each paper. After coding these, (e.g., saying ‘this paper is mostly focused on social issues’), we plotted them. This demonstrated a notable rise in papers related to all three dimensions over the years. Economic issues around sustainability took a little longer to make an impression on the literature but these issues are now showing a larger impact.
Level Of Focus, Organization, Community, Or Society
We also looked at the level of focus of the papers. This was whether the papers paid most attention to the relatively low level of individual organizations (e.g., companies), the medium level of communities, or on society as a whole (the highest-level dimension, e.g., looking at the implications of markets for society). We saw more work on individual companies which is likely explained by the ease of doing such research. When you need data, getting it from a single company is much easier than getting data related to an entire industry. Conducting research on society as a whole is intimidatingly hard. Imagine trying to demonstrate convincingly using diverse data sources that a particular approach to marketing was bad for society.
Looking at the papers and trends over time the good news was the clear increase in research focused towards the area of sustainable marketing strategy. This is a growing area of focus.
Focus Of Sustainable Marketing Strategy Research Over Time
Research Agendas
As is common with research we sought to set an agenda for future work. This can be useful, especially for junior scholars who sometimes want to know what they might want to start thinking about. I have mixed feelings about research agendas. I see authors throwing ideas into future research that are really hard to tackle. Presumably, the reason they didn’t use the idea in the paper was because they couldn’t do it. Future research ideas might say something like, ‘it’d be great if someone could test our theory across a range of industries’. (While leaving off the second part of the sentence — ‘…but we didn’t do this because the data doesn’t exist’). Research agendas might encourage junior scholars to take on the hardest tasks that senior scholars can’t do. This seems a little cruel to me.
Furthermore, I do worry that we really should want junior scholars to think of their own ideas. An advantage of bringing in new scholars is that they are supposed to bring new ideas. If they just follow the ideas in research agendas it all seems a bit of a waste of time. How can we progress if people aren’t willing to do things that senior scholars don’t think make sense?
Taking This Further
That said, some elements of research agendas are valuable. At their best, they can distill what has been learned to give pointers and so speed up the progress of future research. I’m going to assume our ideas were valuable because it makes me feel better to do so. I will leave you with a piece of advice close to my heart.
[Studying sustainability and its connection with marketing strategy] will require scholars and practitioners to explore firm performance measurements and consequences that go beyond generally short-term focused financial and accounting measures.
Kim et al, 2024, page 1506
My fear is that we can’t really expect to advance sustainable marketing strategy if we exclusively rely on the performance measures, e.g., market capitalization and financial accounting reports, that have led many to ignore the value of sustainability. I believe changing our performance metrics is vital to stimulating more impactful research.
For more on sustainable marketing research see here.
Read: Youngtak Kim, Neil Bendle, John Hulland, and Mike Pfarrer (2024). Corporate sustainability research in marketing: Mapping progress and broadening our perspective. J. of the Acad. Mark. Sci. 52, 1495–1512 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-024-01050-9
