Climate change and marketing: Stranded research or a sustainable development?

Abstract

Climate change represents an existential crises for economic, social, and natural systems. Given the significance of the topic and the importance of behavioural change, it might be expected that marketing may be a substantial contributor to climate change studies. However, this is not the case with substantially less than 1% of papers in a sample of marketing journals being concerned with climate change. Nevertheless, there is substantial interest in marketing practices and climate change outside of marketing journals. It is therefore posited that, as a discipline, marketing may potentially become a form of stranded research in the social science of climate change rather than a positive sustainable contribution to emissions reduction and consumer studies.It is also observed that a shift in focus from carbon literacy to the carbon capabilities of consumers presents a significant challenge to marketing assumptions about agency and structure and the relative roles of upstream and downstream marketing and the ethics of marketing practice.

Marketing and Sustainability: Business as Usual or Changing Worldviews?

“…In business schools and marketing departments, the strength of the dominant paradigm is such that, "the scope of relevant social science is typically restricted to that which is theoretically consistent" with the dominant worldview [141] (p. 1280) (our emphasis). This means that policymakers, research agencies, universities and the private sector, fund and legitimise lines of enquiry that generate results that they can accept and manage, even if they do not necessarily provide the "solution" to the sustainability problem [82,142], with the same approach also often extending into educational and research practices [9,12]. The result is a self-fulfilling cycle of credibility [143] in which evidence of relevance and value to policymakers and research funders helps in securing additional resources for approaches that fulfil the dominant paradigm and not others.…”

“…"Ecological awareness has been treated, like most virtues in the capitalist marketplace, as an individual taste rather than a social necessity" [11] (p. 86). For example, in examining the contribution of marketing to research on climate change, including mitigation and adaption, Hall [12] searched 53,685 documents in 89 marketing serials with respect to the occurrence of "climate change" or "global warming" and found that only 349 (0.65%) had either climate change or global warming mentioned in their text and the terms being used as a keyword in only 16 documents (0.03%). Yet marketing, especially as a method, is widely recognised as being able to make a substantial contribution to climate change research and policymaking [13][14][15], although the vast majority of research on the relationship between climate change and marketing occurs outside of the marketing field and that the research that is conducted "within" marketing tends to be focussed around social marketing approaches to behavioural change [10,12,16].…”

Critiquing a Utopian Idea of Sustainable Consumption: A Post-Capitalism Perspective

“…There is an underlying assumption that sustainable consumption can be achieved within the current neoliberal free-market and statism model that prioritises economic growth, consumerism, and the power and wealth of political elites. However, this mind-set can restrict adventurous transformative sustainability thinking for change to a more just world; a concern expressed by Hall (2018), Little and Helm (2019), and Swilling (2020). Indeed, the jeopardy of this SDG from increasing consumer materialism is already noted in a 2019 report to the UN Economic and Social Council (UN 2019a).…”

Harnessing social listening to explore consumer cognitive bias: implications for upstream social marketing

“…Importantly, however, people do express the desire to minimize their impact on a changing climate and to assist in a manner that is socially conscious (DeVincenzo and Scammon, 2015). Hence, discrepancies between scientific and public views highlight a need to explore what drives variances in opinions among the public, and identify what strategies could be implemented to focus efforts on mitigating the impacts of climate change (Bolderdijk et al, 2017;Hall, 2018;Helm et al, 2018). For marketers, digital commentary represents a potential avenue for data exploration, particularly in the realm of policy debates (Mehmet and Simmons, 2019).…”