Environment and Sustainability

List of Contributors

Hicran Özgüner Kılıç

The Effect of Environment on Marketing: Sustainable Marketing

Introduction

Enterprises, by their nature, both affect their environment and are affected by it. This is a requirement of being an open system. Marketing success of enterprises depends mostly on the ability of managers to manage marketing plan and programs in this environment. As far as the interaction between marketing and the environment is taken into consideration, it is necessary to continuously observe and evaluate the developments and changes in the environment. When the environmental factors are evaluated with regard to natural resources and pollution, it is seen that the balance of life changes negatively each passing day. The efforts of turning the balance into a positive direction, namely nature and environment consciousness, started especially during the 1980s with the enforcement of the law on environment protection and continued during the 1990s with the integration of environment-friendly product and services into the market and has developed so far today. Protection of environment and environment consciousness can be explained with the notion of sustainability. Sustainability can be defined as the protection process of some factors required by social, economic and ecologic systems. Sustainable marketing that emerges as an application of relationship marketing approach, the last step of the development of marketing, is a structure that supports this process. Sustainable marketing can be defined as establishing and sustaining sustainable relations with consumers, social environment and natural environment. The sensitive enterprises that give importance to the protection of the environment and consumers should behave accordingly in all marketing activities such as developing, pricing, distributing and promotion of products and services.

In this respect, this study is going to deal with the relationship between marketing and the environment, environmental change in the structure of the market, development process of a sustainable marketing, the notion of sustainable marketing and sustainable marketing mix.

In order to put forth the relationship between marketing and environment, it is necessary to talk about two main marketing approaches. These approaches are traditional marketing and relationship marketing. Traditional marketing is defined as “the process of planning and applying the efforts of creating, pricing, distributing and selling products, services and ideas in a way that will ensure change in accordance with the aims of persons and organizations.” To put it differently, it is defined as the sum of organization activities that direct goods and services from manufacturers to consumers or users for fulfilling the goals of enterprises and satisfying the needs and desires of current customers and potential consumers (Dinçer, 2012: 1). Since the 1970s when the approach of traditional marketing used to be dominant, serious arguments have been made about the relationship between marketing and the environment. Marketing has two roles, namely the role in stimulating the demand and consumption on the unsustainable level and the role in activating market mechanisms to tackle social and environmental problems (Peattie, 2001: 129). These two roles contradict with each other. Enterprisers attempt to both encourage consumption and solve the problems resulting from over consumption. It should also be mentioned that traditional marketing approach has a significant role in the development of these ecologic problems. The reason for this is considered to result from the facts that the traditional marketing approach causes over consumption of products and services, that the system ignores environmental factors, that status is believed to increase with the assets possessed, that short-term profit maximization is aimed and a profit-oriented approach is adopted and that the life course of product is quite short because of resource-waste cycle (Pezikoğlu, 2010: 827).

According to the relationship marketing approach, marketing is defined as a social science that aims to form and sustain long-term relations that add value to its stakeholders and establish communication and interaction (Erdoğan, 2014: 5). Departing from these definitions, the enterprises, within the plan and programs of their marketing activities, need to develop and offer products and services that look out for the desire and needs of all their stakeholders and be careful to use the available resources and opportunities optimally during that process. Especially during the 1980s, the enterprises started to find out some ways to use available resources effectively and please the stakeholders. The number of international non-profit organizations increased, governments carried out some activities and a public awareness started to develop (Aytekin, 2007: 1). All these pressures and efforts, limitless desire and needs of consumers and the scarcity of resources increased the importance of environment consciousness during the ←12 | 13→1990s. The enterprises aim to provide information to the consumers on environment and nature friendly products, behave with the consciousness of using the available limited resources in an effective manner, direct the activities of the enterprises and fulfill the desires of consumers (Ayyıldız and Genç, 2008: 506). These efforts contribute to the development and maintenance of long-term relations with the stakeholders. The sustainable marketing that emerges as an application of relationship marketing, the last step of marketing development, is a structure that supports this process.

Enterprises are effective in directing marketing activities and the behaviors of their target group. For this reason, they fulfill a significant function in increasing the marketing life standards and creating environment consciousness around the world (Onaran, 2014: 42). Integrating sustainable marketing practices into the approach of relationship marketing, creating environment consciousness and giving importance to the approach of nature protection have prompted the people or organizations interested in these issues and led to the integration of the environment related criteria into international quality standards and legal regulations (Armağan and Karatürk, 2014: 3). These organizations, standards and regulations adopt environmental consciousness in all of the processes including product supply and usage and the application of recycling activities. They aim to provide environmental benefits in all products and production activities that affect all living creatures and wildlife, exist and will exist in the market (Özçelik, 2017: 5). As a result, compliance with the relevant regulations on the protection of environment turns into an obligation and shows increase. Some of these organizations are the United Nations Development Program (UNDP), the Food and Agriculture Organization, NATO, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Council of Europe, the International Trade Organization, IMF and the World Bank. Stockholm United Nations Conference on Human and Environment, Brundtland Report, Rio United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Johannesburg World Summit of Sustainable Development and Kyoto Protocol can be given as examples for some of the global efforts (Yılmaz and Güney, 2015: 239).

2 Environmental Factors in the Birth and Development Process of Sustainability

The notion of sustainability emerged first in the document of World Charter for Nature accepted by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in 1982. According to this charter, it is foreseen that the ecosystem, organisms, land, sea and atmosphere resources should be managed in a way to ←13 | 14→obtain optimum sustainability without putting the integrity of ecosystems and species into danger (Mısırdalı Yangil, 2015: 358).

The current definition of the notion of sustainability was provided in 1987 in Brundtland Report prepared by the World Commission on Environment and Development. The issue that is emphasized in the notion of sustainability about the environment is to enable and manage the usage of natural resources optimally without putting the lives of living beings into danger. In the formation of sustainability, various environment-related economic and social problems such as increase in worldwide pollution and population, resource depletion, global warming as well as increase in the need for energy generating resources are observed and (Adanacıoğlu, 2015: 596) solutions for them are tried to be found. It came out as ecologic marketing in 1975 during the first period of sustainable marketing development process under the auspices of American Marketing Union (Çakır, 2017: 336). Ecologic marketing can be defined as marketing activities aiming to prevent such environmental problems as natural resources depletion and air pollution with some technological and social opportunities (Armağan and Karatürk, 2014: 3). During those years, the notion of ecological marketing was mostly related to decreasing specific environmental problems in the industries that have the biggest environmental effect by developing new technologies (Peattie and Charter, 2003: 727). The second period of the 1980s was related to environmental marketing that focuses on defending clean energy, understanding and targeting green consumers, displaying a good socio-environmental performance as a potential of competitive advantage and encouraging marketers to obtain the physical system appearance of enterprises (Hunt, 2011: 7). Environmental marketing denotes marketing activities that enterprises carry out by paying more attention to the natural environment (Çabuk and Nakıpoğlu, 2003: 42). Environmental marketing has enlarged its scope by including cleaning products, white goods, carpet, paper etc., and such services as banking and tourism (Peattie, 2001: 134). The environmental disasters that have been experienced since the 1970s and 1980s have continuously increased the interest in the environment (www.ntv.com.tr). During the same years with those disasters, Article 56 of the 1982 Constitution of Turkey included the following provision: “Every person has the right to live in a healthy and balanced environment and improving the environment, protecting its health and preventing environmental pollution is the duty of the state and citizen”. In addition, the Environmental Law dated 1983 and numbered 2872 (www.cevreonline.com), deals with the issue of environment with an approach accepted in many developed countries by charging the state and individuals with the duty of protecting and improving the environment. Apart from these, “the right of living in a healthy environment” accepted ←14 | 15→by the organization of international consumers union was announced worldwide as one of the international rights of the consumers (Atalay Oral and Akpınar, 2011: 3). These legal amendments gained a larger dimension with the experienced disasters, the efforts to slowly develop an environment consciousness, discussions on environment that emerged at the beginning of the 1990s, extinctions of species, destruction of some ecosystems as well as poverty and famine (Ar Akdeniz, 2011: 57). This enlarged dimension of the third period refers to the sustainable marketing, which is the marketing dimension of the notion of sustainability foregrounded in many areas such as economy and finance.

3 The Notion of Sustainable Marketing

Sustainable development is defined as a kind of development that “meets the needs of today without depriving the future generations from their ability to meet their own needs”. For this reason, sustainable marketing is defined as “marketing activities that support a sustainable economic development” (Hunt, 2011: 7).

Various definitions have been provided for the definition of sustainable marketing. G. Armstrong and P. Kotler claim that sustainable marketing “is socially responsible and environment-friendly marketing that meets the current needs of consumers and businesses while preserving or even improving the ability of future generations to meet their future needs” (Krukowska-Miler, 2017: 2). The notion of sustainable marketing is mentioned in Fig. 1.

In Fig. 1, the notion of sustainability is based on the principle that the fulfillment of current needs and wishes of consumers depends on market conditions, company’s resources, marketing activities, communication with consumers, foreseeing the protection of environmental resources and their development (Praude and Bormane, 2014: 168). In other words, the main principle behind sustainable ←15 | 16→marketing is to put forth the decisions with which environmental problems are emphasized and environment forces are used in a competitive manner. The notion of sustainable marketing aims to meet the needs of future generations, which means creating a sustainability-based value for future generations, forming and distributing communication (Capatina, Micu, Cristache and Micu, 2017: 288).