Green Marketing and Social Practices: Managing People as Carriers of Sustainability Practices

Abstract

Addressing the world’s environmental challenges demands the sustainable transformation of existing production and marketing processes. By adopting green marketing as a corporate strategy, businesses can achieve their organisational goals while also driving the sustainable development of host countries. However, given the unique socio-economic and political challenges of less-developed economies, businesses may encounter the risk of enabling unsustainable consumption and promoting greenwashing. To successfully implement a green marketing strategy, this chapter posits that businesses in emerging markets should move beyond attempting to influence people’s attitudes, choices or behaviour to consider the social practices that constitute organisational and socio-economic processes. By conceptualising people as carriers of social practices, this chapter further examines how the interaction of materials, meanings and competences create everyday consumption and routines. From a social practice perspective, the green marketing strategies corporate organisations in emerging markets can adopt to promote people management and sustainable development include influencing social practice performance, promoting the emergence or dissolution of social practices, enabling communities of sustainability practices and addressing the socio-economic consequences of conflicting social practices.