Authors: Sylvie Lacoste
If marketing has been typically defined as the task of creating, promoting and delivering goods and services to consumers and businesses (Kotler et al., 2006), it has now the task to deliver sustainable goods and services, involving the three described dimensions, which broadens up the role of marketing within organisations.Whereas much of the focus of academic research on sustainable marketing has targeted the environmentally conscious consumer, there are few studies linking sustainability to business-to-business marketing. The aim of this paper is to study how sustainability has become a marketing tool that drives innovation in business-to-business relationships and to discuss the interaction between marketing strategies, innovation and sustainability.Literature addressedOur theoretical framework is based on the Resource-Advantage theory of competition (R-A theory) defined by Hunt and Morgan (1995): if we posit that sustainability is nowadays accepted as a key success factor of the firm business strategy (Kuosmanen and Kuosmanen, 2009), resources dedicated to sustainability may create a competitive advantage (Porter and Kramer, 2006) if efficient and innovative sustainable products/services are hence delivered, increasing customer value (Barney, 1991).MethodologyThe field study is based on the researcher’s attendance as guest sponsor to practitioners’ workshops gathering senior executives from marketing and sustainability departments from multinational companies in Paris (around 60 members) to think over how to better link sustainability and marketing strategy. Such workshops were held regularly from October 2010 until October 2011, when a general meeting was organised to present the outcome of the different sessions.Main contributionWe suggest a new “ sustainability advantage theory of competition” framework (see figure 4), which shows how the sustainability concept is used either to create a new (sustainable) customer segment or retain sustainable-focussed customers with innovation targeted to extend the range of products with new sustainable characteristics, or to avoid customer defection by integrating non-sustainable products into a service (process and organizational innovation) as the function of the core product is embedded into the sustainable use of the product. In both cases, innovation is driven by sustainability and creates a competitive advantage to the supplier by bringing a higher value share to the customer.
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Publish Year: 2012
Conference: Rome, Italy (2012)