Consumerism is an organized movement of citizens and government agencies to improve the rights and power of buyers in relation to sellers. Traditional sellers’ rights include the following:

• The right to introduce any product in any size and style, provided it is not hazardous to personal health or safety, or, if it is, to include proper warnings and controls

• The right to charge any price for the product, provided no discrimination exists among similar kinds of buyers

• The right to spend any amount to promote the product, provided it is not defined as unfair competition

• The right to use any product message, provided it is not misleading or dishonest in content or execution

• The right to use buying incentive programs, provided they are not unfair or misleading

Traditional buyers’ rights include the following:

• The right not to buy a product that is offered for sale

• The right to expect the product to be safe

• The right to expect the product to perform as claimed

In comparing these rights, many believe that the balance of power lies on the seller’s side. True, the buyer can refuse to buy. But critics feel that the buyer has too little information, education, and protection to make wise decisions when facing sophisticated sellers. Consumer advocates call for the following additional consumer rights:

• The right to be well informed about important aspects of the product

• The right to be protected against questionable products and marketing practices

• The right to influence products and marketing practices in ways that will improve “quality of life”

• The right to consume now in a way that will preserve the world for future generations of consumers

Each proposed right has led to more specific proposals by consumerists and consumer protection actions by the government. The right to be informed includes the right to know the true interest on a loan (truth in lending), the true cost per unit of a brand (unit pricing), the ingredients in a product (ingredient labeling), the nutritional value of foods (nutritional labeling), product freshness (open dating), and the true benefits of a product (truth in advertising).

Proposals related to consumer protection include strengthening consumer rights in cases of business fraud and financial protection, requiring greater product safety, ensuring information privacy, and giving more power to government agencies. Proposals relating to quality of life include controlling the ingredients that go into certain products and packaging and reducing the level of advertising “noise.” Proposals for preserving the world for future consumption include promoting the use of sustainable ingredients, recycling and reducing solid wastes, and managing energy consumption.

Sustainable marketing applies not only to businesses and governments but also to consumers. Consumers have not only the right but also the responsibility to protect themselves instead of leaving this function to the government or someone else. Consumers who believe they got a bad deal have several remedies available, including contacting the company; making their case through the media or social media; contacting federal, state, or local agencies; and going to small-claims courts. Consumers should also make good consumption choices, rewarding companies that act responsibly while punishing those that don’t. Ultimately, the move from irresponsible consumption to sustainable consumption is in the hands of consumers.

Whereas consumerists consider whether the marketing system is efficiently serving consumer wants, environmentalists are concerned with marketing’s effects on the environment and the environmental costs of serving consumer needs and wants. Environmentalism is an organized movement of concerned citizens, businesses, and government agencies designed to protect and improve people’s current and future living environment.

Environmentalists are not against marketing and consumption; they simply want people and organizations to operate with more care for the environment. They call for doing away with what sustainability advocate and Unilever CEO Paul Polman calls “mindless consumption.” According to Polman, “The road to well-being doesn’t go via reduced consumption. It has to be done via more responsible consumption.”16 The marketing system’s goal, environmentalists assert, should not be to maximize consumption, consumer choice, or consumer satisfaction but rather to maximize life quality. Life quality means not only the quantity and quality of consumer goods and services but also the quality of the environment, now and for future generations.

Environmentalism is concerned with damage to the ecosystem caused by global warming, resource depletion, toxic and solid wastes, litter, the availability of fresh water, and other problems. Other issues include the loss of recreational areas and the increase in health problems caused by bad air, polluted water, and chemically treated food.

Over the past several decades, such concerns have resulted in federal and state laws and regulations governing industrial commercial practices affecting the environment. Some companies have strongly resented and resisted such environmental regulations, claiming that they are too costly and have made their industries less competitive. These companies responded to consumer environmental concerns by doing only what was required to avert new regulations or keep environmentalists quiet.

In recent years, however, most companies have accepted responsibility for doing no harm to the environment. They have shifted from protest to prevention and from regulation to responsibility. More and more companies are now adopting policies of environmental sustainability. Simply put, environmental sustainability is about generating profits while helping to save the planet. Today’s enlightened companies are taking action not because someone is forcing them to or to reap short-run profits but because it’s the right thing to do—because it’s for their customers’ well-being, the company’s well-being, and the planet’s environmental future. For example, fast-food chain Chipotle has successfully built its core mission around environmental sustainability—its aim is to serve “Food With Integrity” (see Real Marketing 20.1).

Figure 20.2 shows a grid that companies can use to gauge their progress toward environmental sustainability. It includes both internal and external greening activities that will pay off for the firm and environment in the short run and beyond greening activities that will pay off in the longer term.

Figure 20.2

Environmental Sustainability and Sustainable Value

At the most basic level, a company can practice pollution prevention. This involves more than pollution control—cleaning up waste after it has been created. Pollution prevention means eliminating or minimizing waste before it is created. Companies emphasizing prevention have responded with internal green marketing programs—designing and developing ecologically safer products, recyclable and biodegradable packaging, better pollution controls, and more energy-efficient operations.

For example, in creating new products, athletic shoe and apparel maker adidas considers their environmental impact before ever producing them. This results in low-waste footwear and apparel, such as Element Soul shoes, which yield both performance and sustainability benefits. With their simplified design—only 12 parts instead of the typical 50—the lightweight shoes give athletes a more natural run while at the same time cutting down on materials, waste, and energy use in production. On a broader scale, adidas has developed a restricted substances list for product design and manufacturing: no PVCs, no materials from endangered or threatened species, and less and less materials from non-sustainable sources. adidas has also set ambitious internal goals for reducing greenhouse emissions and energy, water, and paper consumption in its operations. And it has set up Green Teams at locations around the world whose members promote adidas’s environmental programs internally and urge their colleagues to “think green,” such as reducing office waste going to landfills.17

At the next level, companies can practice product stewardship—minimizing not only pollution from production and product design but also all environmental impacts throughout the full product life cycle while at the same time reducing costs. Many companies have adopted design for environment (DFE) and cradle-to-cradle practices. This involves thinking ahead to design products that are easier to recover, reuse, recycle, or safely return to nature after usage, thus becoming part of the ecological cycle. DFE and cradle-to-cradle practices not only help to sustain the environment, but they can also be highly profitable for the company.

For example, more than a decade ago, IBM started a business—IBM Global Asset Recovery Services—designed to reuse and recycle parts from returned mainframe computers and other equipment. Last year, IBM processed more than 54.3 million pounds of end-of-life products and product waste worldwide, stripping down old equipment to recover chips and valuable metals. Since 2002 it has processed more than 1.09 billion pounds of machines, parts, and material. IBM Global Asset Recovery Services finds uses for more than 99 percent of what it takes in, sending less than 1 percent to landfills and incineration facilities. What started out as an environmental effort has now grown into a multibillion-dollar IBM business that profitably recycles electronic equipment at 22 sites worldwide.18

Today’s greening activities focus on improving what companies already do to protect the environment. The beyond greening activities identified in Figure 20.2 look to the future. First, internally, companies can plan for new clean technology. Many organizations that have made good sustainability headway are still limited by existing technologies. To create fully sustainable strategies, they will need to develop innovative new technologies.

For example, by 2020, Coca-Cola has committed to reclaiming and recycling the equivalent of all the packaging it uses around the world. It has also pledged to dramatically reduce its overall environmental footprint. To accomplish these goals, the company invests heavily in new clean technologies that address a host of environmental issues, such as recycling, resource usage, and distribution:19

First, to attack the solid waste problem caused by its plastic bottles, Coca-Cola invested heavily to build the world’s largest state-of-the-art plastic-bottle-to-bottle recycling plant. As a more permanent solution, Coke is researching and testing new bottles made from aluminum, corn, or bioplastics. It has been steadily replacing its PET plastic bottles with PlantBottle packaging, which incorporates 30 ­percent plant-based materials. The company is also designing more eco-friendly distribution alternatives. Currently, some 10 million vending machines and refrigerated coolers gobble up energy and use potent greenhouse gases called hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) to keep Cokes cold. To eliminate them, the company has been installing sleek new HFC-free coolers that use 30 to 40 percent less ­energy—so far more than 1.4 million have been installed. Coca-Cola has even developed a line of “eKOCool” solar-powered coolers that not only conserve energy resources but are also functional in rural areas of emerging economies such as India, where conventional power sources are often unreliable. And Coca-Cola is now almost 100 percent “water neutral,” adding back to communities and nature the equivalent of all the fresh water that its bottlers use in the production of Coca-Cola beverages.

Finally, companies can develop a sustainability vision, which serves as a guide to the future. It shows how the company’s products and services, processes, and policies must evolve and what new technologies must be developed to get there. This vision of sustainability provides a framework for pollution control, product stewardship, and new environmental technology for the company and others to follow. It addresses not just challenges in the natural environment but also strategic opportunities for using environmental strategies to create sustainable value for the firm and its markets.

Most companies today focus on the upper-left quadrant of the grid in Figure 20.2, investing most heavily in pollution prevention. Some forward-­looking companies practice product stewardship and are developing new environmental technologies. However, emphasizing only one or two quadrants in the environmental sustainability grid can be shortsighted. Investing only in the left half of the grid puts a company in a good position today but leaves it vulnerable in the future. In contrast, a heavy emphasis on the right half suggests that a company has good environmental vision but lacks the skills needed to implement it. Thus, companies should work at developing all four dimensions of environmental sustainability.

The North Face, for example, is doing just that through its own environmental sustainability actions and its impact on the actions of suppliers and consumers:20

The North Face’s new headquarters building in Alameda, California, comes complete with solar panels and wind turbines that generate more electricity than the building uses. The building employs an evaporating cooling system that eliminates the need for emissions-heavy coolants. The company’s other regional headquarters and distribution centers also incorporate solar or water-saving features. In manu­facturing, The North Face works closely with suppliers to achieve its goal to use polyester—which makes up 80 percent of its clothing lines—from 100 percent recycled content. The North Face also partners with suppliers to reduce waste and chemical, water, and energy usage in their mills. Since 2010, The North Face’s suppliers have removed more than 100 tanker trucks of chemicals and more than 230 Olympic swimming pools of water from their manufacturing processes.

In addition, The North Face has dedicated itself to inspiring customers to reduce the waste generated by today’s fast-fashion era. The company’s lifetime apparel and gear warranty results in the return and repair of more than 80,000 products annually. The North Face also runs a program called “Clothes the Loop,” by which it collects worn-out or unwanted used clothing of any brand from customers for recycling or renewal. Items dropped in its collection bins are sent to a recycling center where they are carefully sorted, then repurposed for reuse to extend their life or recycled into raw materials for use in making other products. Proceeds from the program benefit the Conservation Alliance, which funds community-based campaigns to protect shared wilderness and recreation areas.

For The North Face, being environmentally sustainable is about more than just doing the right thing. It also makes good business sense. More efficient operations and less wasteful products not only are good for the environment but also save The North Face money, helping it to deliver more value to customers. It’s a winning combination. “At the heart of The North Face is a mission to inspire a global movement of outdoor exploration and conservation,” says The North Face’s president. “We believe the success of our business is fundamentally linked to having a healthy planet.”21

Citizen concerns about marketing practices will usually lead to public attention and legislative proposals. Many of the laws that affect marketing were identified in Chapter 3. The task is to translate these laws into a language that marketing executives understand as they make decisions about competitive relations, products, price, promotion, and distribution channels. Figure 20.3 illustrates the major legal issues facing marketing management.

Figure 20.3

Major Marketing Decision Areas That May Be Called into Question under the Law