Big Business and Sustainability: A Contradiction in Terms?

O'Riordan, Timothy. "Big Business and Sustainability: A Contradiction in Terms?." Environment, June 2006, 3.

As businesses strive to strike the delicate marketing balance between being user friendly and being green, they also are a lead player in the transition to sustainability. This is for a couple reasons, the first being that companies can afford to be patient and projecting over a 20-year lead time. The second reason is because politicians are slow to act when the items they are pushing won’t see results for many years to come. They want a quick return on their investment of time and energy. Big business must be a partner in the movement to sustainability because they can influence politicians. And if businesses are keeping their customers happy with sustainable products they will lean on the politicians to create new, even more sustainable, legislation with new regulations. This shows that if companies can come up with the right scenario that people will be willing to give sustainable options a try even at an added cost, but not until they receive something in return.

Fostering Responsible Communities: A Community Social Marketing Approach to Sustainable Living

Carrigan, Marylyn, Caroline Moraes, and Sheena Leek, “Fostering Responsible Communities: A Community Social Marketing Approach to Sustainable Living,” in Journal of Business Ethics (Springer Netherlands, 2010), 1-20.

Think of an SME as a small community, because while a community is obviously not a business, its residents are the people who own, operate and work at SME’s. Furthermore, while a socially irresponsible organization can negatively impact people’s image of business and CSR, organizations that are responsible can have a positive impact and even encourage change. We’ve discussed previously that green products are becoming more the norm, but a key component of sustainability is to reduce consumption. This article reports on an amazing study of a community which did what it could to bridge the gap between people’s buying of sustainable products and their conflicting consumption habits. It was an experiment done in the small town in the UK called Modbury in which they attempted to eliminate the waste of plastic shopping bags because they do not biodegrade, only break down into smaller pieces and pollute the environment and kill species which ingest them. This article promotes the idea that SME’s are, in fact, small communities and if their leaders can adopt changes than their employees will follow. In the Modbury case the whole town committed to banning plastic shopping bags from any of its small businesses, therefore drastically reducing its carbon footprint and making a statement to other “communities” that change can happen.

Store Brands with a Conscience

Canning, Kathie. "Store Brands with a Conscience." Progressive Grocer 1, no. 4 (October 2, 2010): 14-24.

The concept of sustainability is based on three basic areas – social, environmental and economic. But even though there are three areas that go into the development of a marketing campaign, the environmental aspect is the one which garners most of the attention. This concept is changing, though, as companies realize the importance of something called corporate social responsibility – or CSR. CSR is defined by the World Council for Sustainable Development as “the continuing commitment by business to contribute to economic development while improving the quality of life of the workforce and their families, as well as of the community and society at large.” Companies are using this and its intersection with its own environmental initiatives to help its own economic aspect. In fact, CSR has become so prevalent in the operations of the corporate environment that companies like Walgreen’s, for example, have launched social responsibility websites to make it easier for socially conscious customers to find information about the organization’s efforts in this area. Women, in particular, are paying more attention to these initiatives and factoring them into their purchasing decisions. Other aspects of CSR include extending sustainability-minded certifications to store brands and verifying that the supply chain of the store brand only includes products made using sustainable practices.