Employees as Internal Stakeholders in the Concept of Sustainable Marketing – A Comparative Analysis of European and Asian Market

Abstract

Background. Corporate sustainability has captured the attention of much of the world over the last few years. The idea of sustainability refers to all spheres of the company' activity, including marketing strategy. Before the company starts addressing sustainable marketing activities to external stakeholders effectively it needs to address them to its employees first. The reasons for that are twofold. First, employees play a key role in the process of implementation of sustainable marketing strategies and programmes to external stakeholders, and thus they determine their effectiveness. Second, their sustainable behaviours performed in everyday work show that the company truly cares about sustainable development, and sustainable activities are not perceived as just cheap promotional, short-term actions. In this paper we assume that culture may differentiate employees' attitude towards sustainable marketing activities addressed to them and thus may differentiate sustainable marketing activities undertaken by company managers. Research aims. To explore sustainable marketing activities used by companies towards employees in Europe and Asia, as well as to identify the differences in the * The paper is the result of an international research project grant financed by the National Science Centre in Cracow, entitled: "Sustainable marketing concept and its implementation in selected European markets-identification of international differences", Harmonia Funding, registration no.

Organisational Culture: Reviewing the Conceptual and Importance of Organisational Culture

“…The first thing is the company needs to value their employees by receiving opinions from the employees. Employees are primary stakeholders of the company (Rudawska et al, 2017), and thus, their performances are important and considered as a valuable investment for the company in order to maintain company sustainability in the industry.…”