What is Sustainable Marketing?
Updated 22 December 2025 — Charlie Thompson - Co-Convenor and Course Lead for CISL’s sustainable marketing online courses - defines the scope, impact and opportunity of sustainable marketing and explains why change in this industry is critical. This article draws on Sustainable Marketing Foundationsand Sustainable Marketing, Communications and Brand Management course materials
There’s a common misunderstanding that sustainable marketing is simply the act of promoting sustainable products, services, or experiences. By true definition, this is better described as "marketing sustainability," and while that's an important element of a sustainable marketing practice, it's not the full picture.
Reducing the definition of sustainable marketing to one aspect of its work understates the transformation required. Marketing faces broader, more complex and interwoven challenges and it's critical to recognise that we cannot consume our way into, or through, the economic and cultural transformations ahead.
True transformation of the marketing industry will require reimagining its role in the future we want, realigning its purpose with that future, and rewiring how it is practised to reclaim and redirect the investment, skills, and competencies that fuel it today. Marketing may be largely unrecognisable on the other side of this transformation. But while the full extent of the necessary transformation may not yet be visible, it is possible to name at least four elements of it. Each is best understood as a form of accountability.
Accountability for footprint: marketing's direct and indirect physical impacts
The term “marketing footprint” refers to the physical, real-world impacts that marketing strategies, decisions, and operations have on our collective long-term wellbeing and the social and environmental systems that sustain it. These impacts include the likes of emissions, waste, pollution, land degradation, loss of habitats and species, and effects on human health and equality. As an absolute minimum, sustainable marketing must take accountability for both its direct operational footprint (created via campaigns, production, events, and other activities) and the indirect supply-side (production) and demand-side (consumption) impacts that it influences.
Achieving this requires marketing teams to understand overall systems health and their contribution to it, integrating sustainability into strategic thinking, planning, and execution. It also means using methods and technologies to account for marketing’s direct and indirect footprints, supporting innovation that closes industry-wide measurement gaps, and embracing the leadership role marketing holds in guiding transformation in production and consumption. As such, even this first element goes beyond “marketing sustainability,” as referred to above.
Accountability for truth and accurate information
The consequences of greenwashing and misinformation can scale from being marginally to critically devastating depending on the associated impacts of a claim. Beyond increasing awareness, adoption, and share-of-voice for unsuitable goods and services, this sort of communication reduces the understanding, trust, and action needed across society, poisoning the information ecosystem.
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 our social and environmental systems.
The transformation we need will see marketing managing its moral duty and the potential of its work to create united movements of change that are directed towards the future we want, rather than feeding the collective confusion and inaction that holds this back.
Accountability for a role in business strategy
Too often, marketing accepts a role as simply selling whatever a business produces, abdicating its moral agency in the process. In any sustainable future for marketing, it will need to step into its role as a key component of business strategy. It will help define what a business produces and how it engages its stakeholders, creates and exchanges value, and achieves its optimising goal, contributing positively to social and environmental systems while remaining financially and operationally sound.
Such a marketing strategy will use internal and external insights to inform core investment decisions and connect the company with the world around it. A major part of the transformation we need is about marketing reclaiming its role in the business world. It can and should be a strategic business function with the potential to help drive the change we need.
Accountability for brainprint: marketing's psychological, sociological, and cultural impacts
Marketing shapes perceptions of what is valuable and aspirational, influencing individual and collective worldviews, identities, and lifestyles. Through this, it helps determine what becomes normal, aspirational, and desirable within the cultures and societies it reaches. This influence is known as “marketing’s brainprint".
The iceberg model from systems thinking helps illustrate why brainprint matters: most of what influences a system - mental models, underlying structures, and patterns and trends - lies below the surface. Marketing plays a major role in these hidden layers, shaping many social norms that feel innate today but were intentionally introduced. For example, while the coffee break is a global norm today, it was introduced in the 1950s by the Pan-American Coffee Bureau: an organisation that promoted coffee consumption by positioning the coffee break as a social and productivity-enhancing ritual.
This example, and others like it, show that marketing is not just driving economic transactions but shaping the meaning, social norms, and self-concepts surrounding them.
Every strategic or creative choice made by marketing professionals reinforces sustainable or unsustainable beliefs, norms, and narratives. A truly sustainable marketing practice requires actively recognising these psychological, sociological, and cultural impacts and ensuring this influence is aligned with the sustainable outcomes we want. This means developing narratives that are aligned with sustainable ends, using creativity in service of systemic reimagination and wellbeing, shaping attitudes and actions compatible with a sustainable future, helping people and communities realign what they perceive to be most valuable, aspirational, and desirable with outcomes that enable all living things to thrive.
Conclusion
Ultimately, the fact is that marketing sits in a central and influential position within the socio-economic system, at the intersection of business and society, bridging production and consumption, shaping economic and social outcomes.
From this position, marketing integrates the activities of the business world into daily life, facilitates social conversations, shapes business decisions, and influences what society perceives to be normal, desirable, and valuable. When marketers engage stakeholders well across the value chain, they can influence both supply-side and demand-side innovation and impact. With unique skills and significant financial investment, this influence can be powerful - either reinforcing a financially driven system of extraction and overconsumption, or enabling a reimagined and recalibrated system aligned with long-term wellbeing for all.
Sustainable marketing is therefore about far more than marketing sustainability. Marketing shapes business and society, and sustainable marketing accepts and embraces accountability for doing so. In order to get to a truly sustainable marketing paradigm, we need creative leaders who can blend existing expertise with fresh mindsets, new skills, scientific understanding, and a deeper sense of connection to society and nature.
To explore this further, browse the Sustainable Marketing Foundations and Sustainable Marketing, Communications and Brand Management courses from the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership.
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