Sustainability as a marketing tool: To be or to appear to be? (original) (raw)

The interconnection between sustainability and marketing is closer than it appears. According to one school of thought, the two concepts are incompatible because sustainability is attainable through the reduction of consumption while the objective of marketing is to increase it (Jones, Clarke-Hill, Comfort, & Hillier, 2008). However, this incompatibility is not entirely correct because sustainability has emerged as a new marketing paradigm in the last few decades (Kumar, Rahman, Kazmi, & Goyal, 2012). If a company conducts itself well, what are the effects from a marketing perspective? What if the conduct is poor? The real-life example of the Volkswagen automobile company may help to explain this relationship. The company was recently overwhelmed by an emissions scandal (Barrett et al., 2015) raised by the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA has accused Volkswagen of having installed a defeat device to falsify pollution emissions tests in a large number of its light-duty diesel vehicles in order to conceal a negative impact on the environment. The Business Horizons (2016) xxx, xxx-xxx