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Mikael Ottosson Anders Parment  |  SUSTAINABLE MARKETING

Mikael Ottosson, Ph.D., is a research fellow and senior lecturer in marketing at Linköping University. His research is focused, among other things, on sustainable business development and sustainable consumption. He has written several books and articles on these subjects. Anders Parment, Ph.D., is a research fellow and senior lecturer at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University. He has written more than thirty books and many articles about various aspects of marketing.

SUSTAINABLE MARKETING How social, environmental and economic considerations can contribute towards sustainable companies and markets How can we as consumers, company leaders or students have our needs met without adventuring the possibilities of future generations having their needs met? During recent years, the interest in sustainability issues in general and sustainable companies in particular has increased considerably, among consumers as well as company leaders, politicians, journalists and other groups. So far, there has been a lack of scientific literature reflecting a marketing perspective on the sustainability dimension. This book is the authors’ attempt to fill that void and contribute to making sustainability an integral part of marketing, for instance in business models, brands, and marketing communication.

SUSTAINABLE MARKETING How social, environmental and economic considerations can contribute towards sustainable companies and markets

Honourable mention – Marketing Book of the Year 2014 The Swedish version of the book was rewarded a special prize in The Swedish Marketing Foundation’s annual distinction Marketing Book of the Year in 2014. Art.nr 38825

MIKAEL OTTOSSON ANDERS PARMENT

www.studentlitteratur.se

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Original title: Hållbar marknadsföring - Hur sociala, miljömässiga och ekonomiska hänsynstaganden kan bidra till hållbara företag och marknader © Studentlitteratur, Lund 2015

Copying prohibited This book is protected by the Copyright Act. Copying over and above teachers’ and students’ restricted right to copy for tuition purposes under the Bonus Copyright Access Agreement is prohibited. For information about this agreement, you are referred to the course arranger’s principal or to Bonus Copyright Access. When this book is published as an e-book, it is protected against copying. Those in breach of the Copyright Act may be prosecuted by a public prosecutor and sentenced either to a fine or to imprisonment for up to 2 years and may be liable to pay compensation to the author or title holder. Studentlitteratur publishes both digitally and traditionally. Studentlitteratur’s printed matter is environmentally adapted, both as regards paper and the printing process.

Art. No 38825 ISBN 978-91-44-10485-0 1:1 edition © The authors and Studentlitteratur 2015 www.studentlitteratur.se Studentlitteratur AB, Lund Cover design: Francisco Ortega Cover graphic: NUMAX3D, Artens, majeczka, Galushko Sergey/shutterstock.com Printed by Graficas Cems S.L., Spain 2015

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CONTENTS

Preface 7 1 Introduction  9

Sustainable marketing  9 Social, environmental, and economic aspects of sustainability  12 The field of marketing and sustainability  16 The outline of this book  25 2 Sustainable consumption  27

Consumption from a sustainability perspective – an introduction  27 What is sustainable consumption?  33 What and how do Swedish consumers consume?  41 Why do we consume?  44 Does consumption lead to happiness?  48 Does the sustainable consumer exist?  50 How can consumption be pushed in a more sustainable direction? 54 Ways of influencing our consumption  56 3 Sustainable companies  61

From unsustainable to sustainable companies?  61 The emergence of ideas regarding the sustainable company  69 Defensive, reactive, and proactive approaches to sustainability  76 Is sustainability a strategic issue for today’s Swedish companies?  78 Why are companies not realigning their operations more sustainably? 82 How can companies improve their sustainability endeavours?  86 How can society exert an influence on companies to realign sustainably?  89 ©  T h e a u t h o r s a n d St u d e n t l i tt e r a t u r

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Co n t e n ts

4 Sustainable business  93

Consumer marketing and business to business marketing  93 Model for sustainable business  96 Sustainable business relations – the organisation interacting with the outside world  98 Sustainable strategies are relationship-based  98 Sustainable relationships all the way – production in the third world  102 Corruption 104 Companies must keep tabs on what they are doing!  108 Business relations in civil society  109 5 Sustainable marketing communication  111

Sustainability has increased – but we still have a long way to go  111 What is sustainable marketing communication?  113 Key considerations in marketing communication  115 Communicating sustainability  121 The new marketing-communication landscape  123 Standardisation versus local adaptation  128 Public relations and sustainability  130 Communication – a disruptive element of the everyday life of the consumer?  131 Sustainability labelling  131 6 Sustainable brands  135

What is a brand? From symbols to associations  135 When everything becomes a brand  141 The escalation – the brand society  143 Criticism of brands: the no logo society  145 The influence of brands on society as a whole  148 Social responsibility and sustainability are clearly linked to brand imaging  151 Why brands are important in sustainability efforts  152

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Contents  5

7 Sustainable employers   155

Why this interest in attractive employer brands?  155 The co-worker’s role in achieving sustainability  157 Employer branding  157 Co-workers’ contributions towards the employer’s brand  163 Efforts to enhance an employer’s attractiveness  164 What characterises attractive employers?  165 Sustainable employers help their co-workers in their careers  166 Labour market undergoing change  171 The preferences and driving forces of tomorrow’s co-workers  173 8 From traditional to sustainable marketing  175

The responsibility of business administration and marketing in sustainable development  175 Must companies always offer what the customer demands?  177 Which customer’s needs are to be met?  178 Profitability and good economics: prerequisites for unrelenting efforts to increase sustainability  179 Sustainability orientation – market-driven or market-driving?  180 Sustainable marketing is about relationships – not transactions!  186 From traditional to sustainable marketing  188 References 191 Subject index  213

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PREFACE

This book’s genesis is the result of a number of random discussions, contacts, and events. In the spring of 2012, Anders was lecturing on the course “Marketing and distribution”, a course which he had started in 2006 at Linköping University. Mikael had taken over the course and Anders was there as a guest lecturer. Some interesting discussions quickly arose and, just a few months after their first meeting, Mikael and Anders handed in the basis of what would become Marknadsföring och distribution: Strategiska vägval avseende marknadskanaler [Marketing and distribution: Strategic decisions concerning marketing channels] (Liber, 2013). It would soon be time for a new round of guest lectures and their discussions now dealt with the dearth of sustainability-thinking in the basic business administration literature – an aspect with clear intellectual links to Mikael’s research into energy transitions and the resistance sometimes encountered by realignment towards renewable and sustainable supply strategies. In other business administration fields, such as management/organisation, there are a great deal of publications with a sustainability focus, but things are very scant in marketing, as is also the case in management control, accounting, and financing. After having established a rather tight schedule, the project was launched. With the assistance of publisher Ola Håkansson, well-known in the field of business studies, all the ideas could soon be converted into the text which, with the meritorious and rapid support of the publisher and the rest of Studentlitteratur’s editorial office, you now see before you. We have consciously chosen a critical approach to company practice, which is unavoidable when it comes to a field wherein practice exhibits such major deficiencies. Marketers in particular have a well-developed ability – it goes with their professional territory, of course – to persuade consumers and other stakeholders, making us consider it necessary to scrutinise the practice. We have also attempted to find good examples, causing us to take, in a great deal of cases and respects, a positive view of, or even praise, the practice of companies and other organisations. This book also has a problematizing nature. This problematizing attitude characterises, for instance, the McDonald’s case in Chapter 6. There, we ©  T h e a u t h o r s a n d St u d e n t l i tt e r a t u r

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P r e fac e

discuss a number of sustainability-oriented problems that the company encounters while also asking ourselves whether or not the criticism that the company is often on the receiving end of is fair given what other, competing restaurants offer from the point of view of sustainability. Major multinationals often have to take the blame for the criticism – entirely right in essence – which is levelled at companies, but we take a critical stance regarding the romantisation of companies which are admittedly small and which act locally, but which do not, perhaps, get involved in sustainability work at all. In this book, we are particularly critical as regards so-called greenwashing, i.e. when companies claim that their products are more environmentally-friendly than is actually the case. Our hope is that you, the reader of his book, will reflect more upon sustainability dimensions and act on the basis of these insights – exactly as we, as the authors, will continue to do in various ways – by means of lectures, writing articles and books, seminars, and consultancy work. During the course of our work, we have more and more come to realise how important it is for those of us living in today’s society to work towards creating a sustainable society for the future. We are only too happy to consume, go on holiday, eat good food, and lots more but we will never be able to continue doing that without factoring sustainability effects into the equation. Thanks to Studentlitteratur publisher Ola Håkansson and editor Åsa Sterner who, with great turns of speed and flair, converted our at times error-laden MS and sundry loose attempts at figures into a readyto-print file. Finally, we alone are entirely responsible for all the errors and shortcomings which, despite Åsa’s painstaking review, still encumber this book and its contents. Linköping and Stockholm, January 2015 Mikael Ottosson, PhD Anders Parment, PhD

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Sustainable companies

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This chapter introduces research into sustainable companies. We discuss how companies have historically been regarded as something which, by definition, is unsustainable and we follow the emergence and break­ through of the notion of the sustainable company. We show most of the advantages that sustainable companies can achieve in the marketplace and discuss a number of explanations as to why companies do not realign themselves in a more sustainable direction.

From unsustainable to sustainable companies? Companies that act without having sustainability in their sights are being noticed more and more by a number of different stakeholders. Critical consumers, at times organised via consumer movements, the environmental movement, and the mass media, are important actors when it comes to pushing companies towards sustainability. Glaring media headlines about how workers making Apple iPhones are committing suicide, about how horse meat is being sold as beef, or about how those making clothes for H&M in factories in Cambodia are earning the equivalent of SEK 3 per hour reach today’s critical consumers promptly. When really profitable companies like Apple and H&M show themselves to be acting in a manner that does not promote sustainability, human rights, and ethics etc, this becomes a rewarding subject to write about. Even though it can be argued in different ways, and various standpoints can be taken, this type of event adds to a general sense of disdain towards profitable companies which, to a high or exaggerated degree, exploit cheap labour opportunities in the third world. The trend towards grassroots-driven information, whereby critical consumers create and manage the information flow, not least via social media and alternative not-for-profit media channels, is pushing companies into working towards sustainability. Other factors affecting today’s companies include the ever increasing costs that the govern©  T h e a u t h o r s a n d St u d e n t l i tt e r a t u r

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ment and the EU are saddling companies with in order to make it more expensive to act unsustainably. Examples of such levies include carbon dioxide tax and tax on the consumption of electricity. The need for resource housekeeping, ethics, reasonable working conditions etc is thus becoming more and more important. Therefore, a key departure point in this chapter is discussing corporations action logic. CORPORATIONS’ ACTION LOGIC

The traditional view of the economics and business subjects has been that sustainability issues only create costs and must not, therefore, be prioritised any more than is absolutely necessary (Ammenberg 2012). As this chapter will indicate, however, this view has both been criticised and, in many quarters, both theoretically and practically changed during recent years. A company is an organisation with the primary aim of generating monetary profit – this has been the departure point of the business administration view of why companies exist and how they are to be run (cf. Anthony & Govindarajan 2012, Merchant & van der Stede 2011). The majority of medium-sized and large companies in Sweden today are limited liability companies, many of which are also listed. The limited liability company is an organisational form which should aspire towards generating profits, profits which must primarily benefit that company’s shareholders. This is regulated via, for instance, the Companies Act. This departure point is especially prominent in the subject of business administration, where concepts such as profitability, yield, rationality, and efficiency are frequently used. A company’s operations are largely governed by measurements, checks, and analyses of revenues and overheads using calculations, budgets, and outcome assessments. Companies’ time perspectives, however, are often short-term; this applies in particular to listed limited liability companies, which report on a quarterly basis. During recent years, there has been much talk of ‘quarterly capitalism’ when describing the short-termism that seems to govern many listed limited liability companies today – share prices can fall sharply following a quarterly report, despite the fact that it is difficult to draw long-term conclusions from quarterly results. The massive focus on short-termism naturally entails problems from a sustainability perspective. Ammenberg (2012) points to three problems affecting profit-making companies from a sustainability perspective. Firstly, it is not likely that companies will accept unnecessary costs just to be able to act like “good social citizens”. On the other hand, companies can be motivated to make ©  T h e a u t h o r s a n d St u d e n t l i tt e r a t u r

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such investments if they see potential revenue increases or value-­creation by means of, for instance, an augmented brand. Reduced waste management costs is one example of a measure that can be presented to customers as an increased level of responsibility. In parts of the CSR litera­ture, there has been a naive belief that companies will go from prioritizing self-interest to becoming altruistic. A more sober understanding of companies’ reasons for having an increased focus on sustainability thus becomes necessary. At the same time, it is obvious that companies, over time, have increased their level of responsibility. A number of decades ago, scandals were not unusual connected with the dumping of waste in unsuitable places, and the use of dangerous chemicals in products etc. The question is which driving forces companies have in the measures being taken, and how the trend towards increased sustainability can be hurried up. Secondly, Ammenberg highlights the problem of resources not being priced correctly in today’s economic systems. Polluting or ignoring ethical issues is today relatively cheap for companies, sometimes even being free. In order to solve this problem, resources should be priced in a way that reflects socio-economic long-term consequences. Thirdly, according to Ammenberg, there is a need to improve and further develop business administration methodology and practice, not least with regard to cost accounting and economic decision-making data. A typical example of this is so-called non-energy benefits (NEBs), i.e. benefits (over and above direct cost reductions) resulting from energy-­ efficiency investments in industry. Examples of measurable NEBs can include improved working environments and increased staff health, but in the calculations of the industry, the primary focus is investment costs. This entails benefits not being taken into consideration or priced reasonably, and this then disappears from the decision-making data. Using an NEB perspective, a much broader set of effects would be taken into consideration during decision-making. In the subject of marketing, the customer is king, and even though factors like quality, cost, and delivery times are also important, sustainability issues are becoming increasingly essential to today’s customers. If societal evolution continues in this direction, result in changed customer needs, which is reasonable to assume, then companies will be forced to act more long-term as a result of costs which are not being priced today starting to be priced. Externalities like inadequate ethics will thus become internalised within companies’ economic decision-making data. Such tendencies exist even today, e.g. when companies choose to use sustainable materials despite these being more expensive to purchase, or ©  T h e a u t h o r s a n d St u d e n t l i tt e r a t u r

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when they climatically compensate for the carbon dioxide emissions that production creates, despite this being voluntary. Historically, and today too, it is far from self-evident, however, that companies will interest themselves in other stakeholders than their own shareholders and their profit motive. Below, we will thus discuss who company stakeholders are and we will try to outline some development tendencies. WHO ARE COMPANY STAKEHOLDERS?

Despite today’s increasingly palpable sustainability debate, a slightly antiquated picture of companies as unscrupulous and purely short-term benefit maximisers still largely remains. One explanation for this picture is to be found within the classical action logic within the economics subjects – the economic man. The logic that “the economic man” is based on establishes that companies (and for that matter consumers!) only look to their own interests and do not interest themselves in issues concerning externalities that are not priced, e.g. the environment and health problems that using the company’s products creates. One of neoclassical economic science’s foremost advocates, American Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, in his 1970 essay “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”, wrote that corporate responsibility is, and must be limited to, producing sought-after goods and services and to provide jobs (Friedman 1970). According to Friedman, societal benefit is maximised when companies’ profits, and nothing else, are maximised. In this context, we can thus speak in terms of company shareholders being the key stakeholders to acknowledge. Friedman even claims that notions of companies having other liabilities than generating profits risk damaging both companies and, by extension, society in general. Friedman is seen in many circles as controversial due to his clear standpoints vis-à-vis government interventions in the marketplace. Companies pursuing sustainability issues often share the view of the politicians’ and the general public that this business of earning money is something immoral which is to be taxed and controlled. In other words, companies should thus focus on what they do best; i.e. maximise profits for their owners. From such a perspective, companies’ pollution of the air, water, and land, as well as short-term profit maximisation, are thus deemed both rational and positive. Companies working preventatively with sustainability issues can, on the basis of a classical economics perspective, even achieve competitive disadvantage since, for instance, the management of waste entails costs that environmentally-destructive competitors can ignore. Relating companies to terms like sustainable ©  T h e a u t h o r s a n d St u d e n t l i tt e r a t u r

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development, on the basis of a Friedman perspective, thus becomes unimaginable. Friedman is consistent in his advocacy of free enterprise but has also been criticised, not just for this but also for his pro-narcotics liberalism, another manifestation of his “give the customer what the customer wants”-based reasoning. Friedman’s ideas about the shareholder being the company’s key stakeholder gathered more and more influence during the 1980s and 90s via the shareholder value perspective (Rappaport 1986). Financial yield came to be the dominant yardstick for measuring the success of business executives during this period; according to Deal & Kennedy (2000), this came to involve one of the biggest revolutions during the 20th century regarding corporate strategy. One effect of the shareholder value perspective has been the increased slimming-down of companies at which non-related business units, in particular, have increasingly been disposed of and, to the extent that functions have been needed, this has been solved via outsourcing or the establishment of so-called shared service centres (cf. Bergeron 2003, Janssen & Joha 2006, Janssen et al. 2007, Melchior 2008, Parment 2012, Ulbrich 2003, 2006). Too much of a focus by top management on shareholders, however, has been criticised during later years. Cannon (2012 p. 19) writes: The banking crisis and environmental disasters like Deepwater Horizon can be laid at the door of executives who espoused shareholder value and embedded it in their organizations.

Anyone scrutinizing major companies soon discovers that more and more areas and activities are being set up in order for them to become “those good little companies working towards a better society”. Here, we find policies for both CSR and sustainability, the quality assurance of suppliers, co-worker strategies etc, often conveyed via balanced score cards, policies, and other “soft” forms in the hope of being able to appeal to stakeholders. At the same time, there is no doubt that shareholder value remains the overarching perspective. More than one sustainability, customer relations, or public relations manager has been caught between a rock and a hard place when senior management has made decisions that are based on shareholder interests but which are presented as something else. Making shareholders the one and only and most important stakeholder of the company is a far from uncontroversial standpoint. Criticism of this perspective can be highlighted from several quarters, not least from a stakeholder perspective (Freeman 1984). The departure

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point of a stakeholder perspective is that companies cannot solely work on the basis of their shareholders’ interests but must also relate their operations to other stakeholders who have a key relationship with them. In normal cases, for example customers, suppliers, creditors, unions, co-workers, trade associations, governments, and agencies are usually specified as the key stakeholders of companies. It can even be the case that the interests of shareholders are disadvantaged by neglecting, in the long-term, the other stakeholders since the interplay with stakeholders and their approval of what companies do are necessary in order for companies to survive in the long-term. A typical stakeholder model can be seen in Figure 3.1. A debate about who the company’s stakeholders are is being conducted not just within the subject of marketing but also within the field of management control. Shareholder perspectives are contrasted with stakeholder perspectives in the management control literature on performance measurement. Fitzgerald (2007) highlights the merits of the broader measurement achieved when all stakeholders are taken into account during performance measurement. A similar discussion was conducted, for instance, by Merchant & van der Stede (2011), who contrast bottom-line measures with baskets of measures – where the former focuses on the shareholder value, i.e. the financial results for the period, while the latter focuses on the complexity and the many

Employees and families

Financial analysts and investors Agencies

Outside world locally/ globally

Stakeholder organisations

Company Suppliers Citizens

Figure 3.1  Example of a traditional stakeholder configuration where the company is in the centre, with its stakeholders all around it.

Customers

Future co-workers Shareholders

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stakeholders characterising successful enterprise. Balanced scorecards are one good example of “baskets of measures”. During recent years, more and more stakeholder figures have also started including the natural environment as a key stakeholder of today’s companies. In doing so, this marks a refinement of the initial stakeholder perspective due to, for instance, the environment and climate issue now also being regarded as a stakeholder. An interest which cannot be traced to specific organisations and people is placed on an equal footing, in other words, with customers and shareholders for instance. In this respect, the stakeholder model has become less anthropocentric, i.e. it does not just start out from man but also from the environmental and eco-systems’ ability to survive. UNDER WHICH CIRCUMSTANCES IS ECONOMIC GROW TH CREATED?

A key question in the discussion about companies and sustainability concerns the circumstances under which economic growth is created. In order to force this discussion, we can also ask ourselves whether or not economic growth is at all possible under sustainable circumstances. Economic growth and the prosperity that this growth has created constitute a relatively new phenomenon in human history. Before the industrial revolution, the production of goods and services did not, in principle, increase at all, despite a long time horizon, and the population increase was marginal. Which factors, then, have been crucial for the increased production and consumption that characterises developments over recent decades? Classical economic science explanations incorporate factors such as the availability of raw materials and access to both capital and technology (production engineering). Today, these explanations also incorporate institutional conditions such as legislation and access to universities and capital markets, as well as innovations. One product of these conditions is people who have the ability and opportunity to dare to act entrepreneurially. Thus far, the majority are agreed as regards which factors are key to creating economic growth. Exactly how we are going to get there and under which societal prerequisites is, however, highly disputed. What, then, does research say about which prerequisites are required in order for economic growth to be created? Let us first establish the fact that this is a complex issue lacking simple answers. However, Michael Porter’s (1990) extensive study, The competitive advantage of nations, turns many previous conceptions regarding the links between economic ©  T h e a u t h o r s a n d St u d e n t l i tt e r a t u r

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growth and societal prerequisites on their heads. Traditionally, politicians have attempted to help companies achieve competitive advantage by means of reducing both labour costs and costs associated with energy consumption and natural resources. Countries with access to copious amounts of cheap natural resources have been deemed to be in possession of a natural advantage over nations without such prerequisites. However, as Porter (1990) shows us, there are companies from countries that have succeeded in achieving international competitiveness while breaking with traditional assumptions. Porter shows us, for instance, that Scania and Volvo are the world’s most successful makers of heavy vehicles – something which still applies – because they have been on the same market offering similar products – and thus fierce competitive situ­ations have often arisen which have forced both companies to intensify their offerings. Thus, with this point of departure, it is both competition and factors in the industrial environment that drive competitiveness and not primarily low costs. Table 3.1 shows that traditional assumptions about what creates competitiveness are not always right. Even though we have to be careful when drawing too far-reaching conclusions from Porter’s (1990) studies, which are based, however, on extensive empirical studies conducted during the 1980s, they underscore the complexity surrounding which factors are required in order to create Table 3.1  Traditional assumptions about what creates competitiveness are not always right. Assumption

Example of contradiction

Cheap labour creates competitiveness.

The Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, and Germany have all historically had relatively high wages and relatively low unemployment but have still been competitive.

Low interest rates, state surpluses, and a weak exchange rate create competitiveness.

Many nations have been competitive historically while simultaneously having high interest rates, state deficits (e.g. the US, Germany), and a strong exchange rate (e.g. South Korea, Sweden).

Access to cheap energy resources and raw materials is a prerequisite for competitiveness.

Growth in countries like South Korea, Singapore, and Switzerland can be mentioned here as a contradictory example, i.e. countries where there has not been any significant access to cheap energy resources or raw materials.

Unions that are too strong damage competitiveness.

Sweden and Germany are examples of countries with strong unions where both competitiveness and growth have historically been relatively high.

SOURCE: BASED ON PORTER (1990).

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competitive companies and economic growth. Porter’s (1990) point – i.e. that the companies which are most competitive are not always by necessity the companies with the lowest costs, rather those which constantly renew themselves in order to be the best in the world – continues to be extremely topical, however. This also underscores the fact that companies do not necessarily need to be unsustainable or to work under unsustainable conditions in order to become competitive, a discussion which we will develop below.

The emergence of ideas regarding the sustainable company During the 1990s, not least as a result of the Brundtland Commission’s work, more and more researchers, debaters, and business executives came to question the taken-for-granted picture that companies, by definition, are unsustainable organisations and that companies working proactively with sustainability issues will become unprofitable and be knocked out. Thus, the 1990s came to constitute, in many respects, a turning point vis-à-vis how the relationship between sustainability and economic growth was viewed. From purely having been dealt with by consumption and social protest movements in the 1970s and 80s, movements which advocated zero growth and a low-energy society, the sustainability issue has become a key issue for many companies from the 1990s and on. ENVIRONMENTALLY-SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVENESS

The sustainability discussion of the 1990s made a great impression on economics research. One of the most reported studies from the 1990s is the one by strategy researchers Porter and van der Linde (1995a, 1995b). In this study, the authors turn to the classical economic perspective in which environmental issues are purely regarded as overheads for companies. On the contrary, they assert that a green transition will not just be profitable for companies in the short-term, it may even entail direct competitive advantage in the slightly longer-term. Waste, residual products, and spillage are all examples of ineffective and incomplete resource utilisation by companies, adding costs but not creating anything of value to the customer. In concrete terms, the waste and spillage of companies leads to direct costs in the form of waste management and emission charges, e.g. emission rights and carbon dioxide tax. Porter & van der Linde (1995a, 1995b) were of the opinion, however, ©  T h e a u t h o r s a n d St u d e n t l i tt e r a t u r

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Mikael Ottosson Anders Parment  |  SUSTAINABLE MARKETING

Mikael Ottosson, Ph.D., is a research fellow and senior lecturer in marketing at Linköping University. His research is focused, among other things, on sustainable business development and sustainable consumption. He has written several books and articles on these subjects. Anders Parment, Ph.D., is a research fellow and senior lecturer at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University. He has written more than thirty books and many articles about various aspects of marketing.

SUSTAINABLE MARKETING How social, environmental and economic considerations can contribute towards sustainable companies and markets How can we as consumers, company leaders or students have our needs met without adventuring the possibilities of future generations having their needs met? During recent years, the interest in sustainability issues in general and sustainable companies in particular has increased considerably, among consumers as well as company leaders, politicians, journalists and other groups. So far, there has been a lack of scientific literature reflecting a marketing perspective on the sustainability dimension. This book is the authors’ attempt to fill that void and contribute to making sustainability an integral part of marketing, for instance in business models, brands, and marketing communication.

SUSTAINABLE MARKETING How social, environmental and economic considerations can contribute towards sustainable companies and markets

Honourable mention – Marketing Book of the Year 2014 The Swedish version of the book was rewarded a special prize in The Swedish Marketing Foundation’s annual distinction Marketing Book of the Year in 2014. Art.nr 38825

MIKAEL OTTOSSON ANDERS PARMENT

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