Developing a strong sustainability research program in marketing
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THEORY/CONCEPTUAL
Developing a strong sustainability research program in marketing Melea Press 1 Received: 8 February 2020 / Accepted: 12 November 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract This article takes stock of sustainability research in marketing and argues for developing a Strong Sustainability Research (SSR) program, led by a Consumer Culture Theory (CCT) approach. First, I define weak vs. strong sustainability and identify two main problems with continuing to research business with the weak sustainability approach. Second, I discuss past approaches to sustainability research in marketing, which primarily promote weak sustainability. Third, I use the agriculture industry to illustrate how an SSR program in marketing could be developed to bring insights to practitioners and policy makers and build new modes of production, consumption and exchange. Finally, I suggest that the SSR program facilitates collaboration between mainstream marketing and CCT researchers by providing a common ontological platform that can transform epistemological differences into complementary strengths. I argue SSR is a way that marketing research can gain broad impact and relevance. Keywords Consumer culture theory . Critical marketing . Increasing impact . Marketing strategy . Paradigm shift . Research program . Strong sustainability
Introduction Recently, there have been several calls to address the type and level of impact and the relevance of marketing research. These calls have been directed at mainstream marketing research (MMR; Clark et al. 2014; Hunt 2018), Consumer Culture Theory (CCT; Thompson 2019), and the Journal of Marketing audience (MacInnis et al. 2020) more generally. These critiques address issues of methodology (Clark et al. 2014), relevance for audiences beyond marketing academics (Clark et al. 2014; McDonagh and Prothero 2014; MacInnis et al. 2020), and the “dominant theoretical and analytical vernacular of marketing research and practice” (Thompson 2019). However, in the many calls for making marketing research more relevant, the need to directly address sustainability issues, that is, to build strategy for a globalized market facing the effects of climate change, has been overlooked. This includes insights for navigating emerging challenges in natural resource procurement (Mikdashi 2019; Rees 2017) and protection (Tompkins and Adger 2004; George et al. 2015, 2018),
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a decreased appetite for pollution (Fink 2020) and lack of accountability (Gray 2006), increased political and social instability (Levy et al. 2017; Hartley et al. 2017), and the resulting risk throughout the supply chain (Ghadge et al. 2020). The current body of work on sustainability in marketing has begun to address several aspects of these sustainability issues in individual articles and past and forthcoming special issues (Kemper and Ballantine 2019; McDonagh and Prothero 2014; White et al. 2019; e.g. Industrial Marketing Management, Journal
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