Marketing & Entrepreneurship
Why sustainable value creation requires the whole marketing mix.
I could write you the standard sustainability article. Greenwashing is bad. Do not do it. Be authentic. You would agree, nothing would change, and we would both have wasted ten minutes.
The more useful question is structural: why do organisations that sincerely want to do the right thing so often produce a campaign instead of a change? The answer has less to do with whether leaders care than with a quiet mistake many businesses made years ago. We broke marketing into pieces, kept the loudest one, and started calling it the whole discipline.
Marketing has been mistaken for its smallest part
Ask a room of business owners what marketing is and most will describe advertising, perhaps social media. Almost none will mention product design, pricing, distribution, packaging, customer service or after-sales support, though every one of those decisions influences whether a customer buys, returns and recommends.
This is not a semantic argument. McKinsey’s global research with the Association of National Advertisers found the share of CEOs who believe marketing has a clearly defined, well-understood role fell from 90% to 70% in a single survey cycle, and that only half of chief marketing officers were involved in strategic planning at all. Organisations with a single customer- or growth-oriented executive achieved up to 2.3 times more growth than those fragmenting accountability across several roles (Bettati et al., 2025). When everyone owns the customer, no one does.
The problem also exists inside the profession. Research developed by Mark Ritson with Ipsos across 1,226 practitioners in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and Australia found only 35% met the benchmark for foundational marketing knowledge (The Drum, 2026). A discipline that has forgotten its own scope is poorly positioned to defend its place in strategic decision-making.
Which is precisely why sustainability keeps becoming a campaign
If an organisation has already reduced marketing to promotion, handing it sustainability will reduce sustainability to promotion too. The campaign gets made. The supply chain, pricing model, packaging specification and expected product lifespan remain untouched, because those decisions sit in functions that were never in the room.
Greenwashing may look like a communication failure, but it often begins as a structural one. Deliberate deception occurs and should be treated accordingly. Many weaker claims, though, come from something more ordinary: wanting to say something responsible before building enough responsible practice to support it.
Responsibility has to shape value, not decorate it
CSR and sustainability are related but not identical. CSR concerns the responsibilities an organisation carries toward customers, employees, communities and the environment. Sustainability asks whether it can keep creating that value without exhausting the systems it depends on.
Carroll’s (1991) pyramid of corporate social responsibility places economic responsibility at its base: a business must remain viable before it can sustain its legal, ethical and philanthropic commitments. Kotler’s (1972) societal marketing concept supplies the balance: organisations should serve customers’ long-run welfare and society’s, not only their immediate wants. Together they make one point. Profit and responsibility are not opposites. Long-term value requires both.
Put plainly: can a product be considered valuable if it satisfies the customer while imposing substantial costs on workers, communities or the environment?
Keller’s (1993) work on customer-based brand equity explains why communication alone cannot answer that. Brand value lives in what customers know and believe, formed through every encounter rather than advertising alone. A repair policy is a brand association. A supplier’s labour practice becomes one the moment it surfaces. A failed delivery promise communicates something whether marketing approved it or not. Operations are brand communication.
This suggests a maturity continuum:
- Communication. Responsibility appears in the organisation’s claims and campaigns.
- Integration. Responsible practice shapes product, operations and decision-making, including changes customers may never see.
- Value creation. Responsibility shapes how the organisation competes, earns revenue and creates value for stakeholders.
Communication is legitimate when it accurately reflects practice. But only value creation is durable, because it no longer depends on a campaign budget or one leader’s priorities.
Where sustainability actually lives in the marketing mix
For Australian organisations, especially small and medium businesses, this is where the issue stops being philosophical:
- Product and design determine durability, repairability, material use, lifetime cost, and whether a product stays useful rather than becoming waste.
- Distribution determines whether take-back, repair, refill and resale are possible at all. A circular promise needs a channel that runs backwards (Patagonia’s Worn Wear works because it is owned infrastructure, not a campaign).
- Price determines whether the responsible option is accessible to customers and viable for the organisation. A product that cannot sustain its own delivery will not create long-term value, however admirable its purpose.
- Supply-chain choices shape labour conditions, resilience, emissions and access to future contracts. Australia’s climate-related disclosure regime phases in by entity size, with Group 2 entities reporting from 1 July 2026 and value-chain emissions required from the second year (AASB, 2024). Most small businesses are not directly captured. Many will still be asked for data by larger customers that are.
The commercial opportunity is real, although it should not be overstated. Products marketed as sustainable reached 25.4% of United States consumer packaged goods dollar share in 2025, with five-year compound annual growth of 10.9% against 4.0% for the total market and 2.2% for conventionally marketed products (NYU Stern CSB & Circana, 2026). That does not prove the claim caused the growth, nor that every product delivered genuine benefit. It does show responsible attributes can contribute to customer value when they are relevant, credible and supported by the offer itself.
The yoghurt test: salience without overstatement
Even after a genuine improvement, marketing retains one essential responsibility: describing it accurately.
Over three decades, yoghurt has been sold on low fat, then live cultures and gut health, and now high protein; a shift clearly visible in the Australian market (Euromonitor International, 2025). These are real attributes brought forward because shoppers currently care about them. Highlighting a genuine feature that has become salient is not deception; it helps a busy customer recognise relevant value quickly.
Now the same aisle. In November 2023 the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission accepted a court-enforceable undertaking from yoghurt manufacturer MOO Premium Foods over packaging claiming ‘100% ocean plastic’. The resin had been collected from coastal areas in Malaysia, not from the ocean. The more precise phrase ‘ocean bound plastic’ was not treated as misleading (ACCC, 2024). The difference was not whether sustainability was mentioned, but whether the claim was true, specific, substantiated and proportionate to the attribute behind it.
The problem is widespread. An ACCC sweep of 247 Australian businesses found 57% making concerning environmental claims, with food and drink among the worst at 64% (ACCC, 2023). In April 2025, the Federal Court ordered Clorox Australia to pay $8.25 million over misleading ‘50% ocean plastic’ claims used on more than 2.2 million GLAD products (ACCC, 2025).
The damage extends beyond one fine. Chen and Chang (2013) found greenwashing erodes trust directly and through consumer confusion and perceived risk. Once customers distrust the category, honest organisations lose part of their differentiator too. A competitor’s shortcut becomes a shared market cost.
Changing consumption, not simply increasing it
If marketing influences demand, can it responsibly reshape it? Kotler and Levy (1971) argued half a century ago that demarketing is a legitimate marketing task, not to make organisations weaker, but to manage demand in ways that protect long-term value.
The modern forms are practical: refill systems, trade-in programs, repair services, resale platforms, subscription servicing and maintenance education. These generate revenue from relationships, service frequency, margin and retention rather than rising unit volume alone.
White, Habib and Hardisty’s (2019) SHIFT framework offers evidence-based guidance for changing behaviour through social influence, habit formation, appeals to the individual self, feelings and cognition, and tangibility. Its value is moving sustainability away from moral instruction toward how people actually decide.
But purpose alone will not save you
Zero Co attempted the hard version. Refillable ‘forever bottles’, returnable pouches and reverse logistics embedded circularity in the business model rather than the communications plan. It reported revenue of approximately $10.8 million in FY24 and ceased trading in April 2025 after packaging failures, delivery delays and an inability to reach profitability (SmartCompany, 2025).
The lesson is not that circular models cannot work. It is that a responsible business model does not exempt anyone from getting product engineering, distribution reliability, service recovery, pricing and unit economics right. Carroll’s economic base is unforgiving: a business that cannot sustain itself ultimately serves no one.
Fragmented marketing makes both failures possible: promoting responsibility you have not built, or building it without ensuring the rest of the value proposition can hold. Purpose does not substitute for execution across the mix. It raises the stakes on it.
What this means for business
- Name who owns the customer and the total value proposition. If product, price, service, distribution and communication report to leaders with conflicting metrics, no responsibility strategy will survive the org chart.
- Treat profitability as a social responsibility, not a guilty one. Staying commercially viable keeps people employed, suppliers paid and products improving. Updating an offer to meet what customers actually want now is not consumerism; it is how an organisation stays ahead of competitors and remains able to do anything else at all.
- Audit every environmental and social claim against evidence held today. If you could not substantiate it to a regulator this week, revise it. Precision is usually available.
- Ask major customers what sustainability information they will require from suppliers. Their disclosure obligations are likely to become your tender requirements before they become your legal ones.
- Identify at least one revenue line that grows when customers keep products longer. Repair, servicing, refills, resale, parts and trade-ins align retention with responsible consumption.
- Test claims for salience rather than virtue. A true statement about an attribute customers value is good marketing. A technically true statement dressed to imply more than the evidence supports is not.
Sustainability is not a campaign, because a campaign can only describe value an organisation has already chosen to create. The real work happens earlier, in the offer, the operating model, and the decisions that determine whether people, profit and planet keep benefiting long after the advertisement has ended.
References
Australian Accounting Standards Board. (2024). AASB S2 climate-related disclosures. https://www.aasb.gov.au
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. (2023, March 2). ACCC ‘greenwashing’ internet sweep unearths widespread concerning claims [Media release]. https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/accc-greenwashing-internet-sweep-unearths-widespread-concerning-claims
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. (2024, April 18). GLAD bags manufacturer in court for ‘50% ocean plastic’ claims [Media release]. https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/glad-bags-manufacturer-in-court-for-50-ocean-plastic-claims
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission. (2025, April 14). Clorox ordered to pay $8.25m in penalties for misleading ‘ocean plastic’ claims about certain GLAD products [Media release]. https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/clorox-ordered-to-pay-825m-in-penalties-for-misleading-ocean-plastic-claims-about-certain-glad-products
Bettati, A., Jacobs, J., Robinson, K., & Tas, R. (2025, June 16). The CMO’s comeback: Aligning the C-suite to drive customer-centric growth. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-cmos-comeback-aligning-the-c-suite-to-drive-customer-centric-growth
Carroll, A. B. (1991). The pyramid of corporate social responsibility: Toward the moral management of organizational stakeholders. Business Horizons, 34(4), 39–48. https://doi.org/10.1016/0007-6813(91)90005-G
Chen, Y.-S., & Chang, C.-H. (2013). Greenwash and green trust: The mediation effects of green consumer confusion and green perceived risk. Journal of Business Ethics, 114(3), 489–500. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-012-1360-0
Euromonitor International. (2025). Health trends in focus for dairy products in Australia. https://www.euromonitor.com/article/health-trends-in-focus-for-dairy-products-in-australia
Keller, K. L. (1993). Conceptualizing, measuring, and managing customer-based brand equity. Journal of Marketing, 57(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299305700101
Kotler, P. (1972). What consumerism means to marketers. Harvard Business Review, 50(3), 48–57. https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/academics-research/research/detail/1972/what-consumerism-means-to-marketers
Kotler, P., & Levy, S. J. (1971). Demarketing, yes, demarketing. Harvard Business Review, 49(6), 74–80.
NYU Stern Center for Sustainable Business, & Circana. (2026). Sustainable Market Share Index 2025: Sustainability in U.S. CPG — Inside the consumer mindset. New York University. https://www.stern.nyu.edu/experience-stern/about/departments-centers-initiatives/centers-of-research/center-sustainable-business/research/csb-sustainable-market-share-index
SmartCompany. (2025, April 23). Australian circular economy pioneer Zero Co is shutting down. https://www.smartcompany.com.au/startupsmart/zero-co-closing-down-mike-smith-sustainability-startup/
The Drum. (2026, March 23). Ritson calls for end to ‘marketing savant myth’ as Ipsos lays bare knowledge gaps. https://www.thedrum.com/news/ritson-calls-for-end-to-marketing-savant-myth-as-ipsos-lays-bare-knowledge-gaps
White, K., Habib, R., & Hardisty, D. J. (2019). How to SHIFT consumer behaviors to be more sustainable: A literature review and guiding framework. Journal of Marketing, 83(3), 22–49. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242919825649
Photo by ready made on Pexels