What Is Sustainable Marketing- Principles, Strategy, And More ?

Sustainable marketing means that this form of marketing aims to promote a company’s sustainable and environmentally friendly products or services.

A product will consider “sustainable” if it meets this generation’s social behaviour needs and does not interrupt future generations’ requirements.

The main objective of sustainable marketing is to produce products and services that will become associated with the global movement to protect the environment and, in this way, encourage its consumers to do the same.

Five Sustainable Marketing Principles

For sustainable marketing to run smoothly and ensure business success, companies must learn what the five  guiding principles of  sustainable marketing are  and use them as a benchmark for their next sustainable marketing campaign/strategy:

• Consumer-Oriented Marketing

Your efforts must meet the needs of your customers. Your brand and products must reflect consumers’ interests, expectations and values.

The ultimate goal of your products should be to satisfy, be helpful and provide a solution to your existing and potential customers.

Targeting your audience and researching their weaknesses and expectations is essential for establishing customer-oriented marketing.

• Customer Value Marketing

To profit from your sustainable solutions, you must create value for your customers. Product value is similar to quality, features, answers, and user convenience. Creating value helps brands build customer loyalty. However, brands must also be careful to listen to their customers and continually provide and improve product values ​​for long-term success.

• Innovative Sustainable Marketing

Being innovative in marketing is a must-have skill in today’s ever-changing world. People quickly get tired of the same routine and yearn for change. Customers crave innovation even more.

Therefore, the goal of every company should be to innovate, fail, improve and repeat. (The deficient part would be an unfortunate turn of events, which we sincerely hope you don’t experience)

Always look for new inspirations and ideas and look to create a marketing campaign never seen before. Maybe a sustainable marketing campaign seems like a good choice.

• Mission Marketing

Mission marketing aims to adapt the mission to fit broad social terms rather than narrow product terms. Every company should try to find a appropriate social mission that gives better direction to its employees.

So instead of proposing defined product terms, try looking at the big picture and running a marketing campaign with a mission.

Many famous brands such as Ben & Jerry, Dove, and others have tried this marketing strategy, created a  mission statement, and achieved excellent results – use their examples as inspiration for your next campaign.

Does your mission sound something like ‘Produce the most comfortable shoes? Try adding a social component to it.

• Social Marketing

Sustainable marketing adds a third component to the company-customer mix:  social interests. Of course, every company must strive to have the best interests of its customers. However, the mission of companies must go further.

In sustainable marketing, every business must take into account the interests of society in the long term as well. Therefore, marketers should ask themselves how their marketing practices benefit their organization as well as how they benefit the community.

The result is: how your customers perceive your sustainable marketing issues.

So make sure you learn what customer perception is and what are some ways to improve it, which will brand it much calmer to influence your customer’s perception.

Sustainable Marketing Strategy Vs Sustainable Marketing Campaign

As we already know, this marketing can be very profitable.

Not to mention that, rendering to the survey,  sustainable investment assets grew from  $12.0 trillion in 2018 to $17.1 trillion in 2020. That’s a 42% increase.

Five Steps To Successful Sustainable Marketing Strategy

Here are  five easy steps you need to take  to launch your own (successful) sustainable marketing strategy or campaign:

• Be Authentic

Authenticity is critical in any marketing campaign, especially if you want to stand out and lead by example in sustainability practices. So here are about dos and don’ts for your next campaign:

What to do: Make sure your sustainable marketing reflects how you see yourself as a business and how your consumers see you.

• Focus On Your Product Or Service:

Customers remain loyal to a brand since of its products and services. Therefore, providing good quality products following the concept of sustainable marketing is a sure way to retain your customers.

What to do: Your product/service or processes should be the first thing you make more sustainable. Part of this is also to understand what your competitors are doing.

• Simplify Your Messages

Overcomplicating your campaign messages can overwhelm your consumers. Instead, always focus on being straight to the point and being clear about what you want your customers to know.

What to do: Sustainable marketing must be fact-based. But it would help if you made these facts easy to digest. Tell a story, use AI marketing tools or gamification. Then, the sky is the limit.

• See The General Picture:

One of the characteristics of sustainability marketing is seeing the big picture and finding solutions for present and future generations. So always try to find a bigger perspective.

What to do: Let consumers know what social or environmental cause you’re serving and why.

Sustainable marketing means that this form of marketing aims to promote a company’s sustainable and environmentally friendly products or consider Being Transparent:

As some of the samples above have shown, being transparent is often a fruitful marketing strategy. So please don’t be shy and covert, but open up to your consumers and show them what your brand stands for.

What to do: Be as transparent as possible with your production processes or sustainable initiatives. But, of course, you should be comfortable with that.