MSC MARKETING SCIENCE

Rethinking Marketing Education for a Sustainable Future

Sustainability is often preached, but inconsistently practised in the corporate world. Different stakeholders pursue misaligned goals: while governments require companies to implement globally-adopted sustainability practices, consumers often hesitate at paying more for green products.

Businesses are stuck in the middle. How can they market “net-zero” products, while generating sales despite the higher perceived cost?

This fundamental question drives Nanyang Business School’s new marketing module for Master of Science (MSc) in Marketing Science (MMS) participants, “Marketing Sustainability”. Developed and taught by Asst Prof Charlene Chen, the module is designed to foster sustainability principles in emerging marketing professionals.

“It’s a forward-looking course – it’s about encouraging our students to use a marketing toolkit towards pushing the sustainability movement forward,” Prof. Charlene explains. “With the right training, we’ll have more champions of sustainability in marketing, and more effective champions of sustainability as well.”

New module bridges gap between marketing and sustainability

Companies, consumers, activists, and governments define sustainability based on their own short-term considerations – thus, what it means to create long-term value through sustainability can be interpreted in widely divergent ways.

Prof. Charlene’s real-world approach to sustainability recognises the importance of the bottom line. “A company can only be a force for good if it is solvent,” she explains. “If the company goes under, it loses the opportunity to make a big difference in the world.”

Prof. Charlene uses the “triple bottom line” as a useful lens to understand how competing parties can make common cause on sustainability. “You need to balance three things,” she explains:

• Planet – “Doing good and protecting our planet;”
• People – “We need to take care of the people who work for us;” and
• Profit – “As much as we care about the planet, you should also care that the company needs to be financially sustainable.”

There’s no contradiction in the “triple P” framework: Prof. Charlene explains that “once you balance people and planet, very often, you can make a profit!” The stats bear this out: a Morgan Stanley survey found that over 80% of companies see potential financial opportunities from their sustainability strategies over the next five years.

Fighting the sustainability premium

Despite these encouraging findings, many businesses are reluctant to commit to sustainable practices and products – much less make sustainability a key marketing message. For starters, businesses watching their bottom line are wary about the additional cost required.

“Doing R&D, changing up your production line, or working with different suppliers add to costs, not only in terms of money but in terms of added work,” Prof. Charlene explains.

For their part, consumers do not respond all the same way to a sustainability-centred marketing message. Hype aside, “green products” are still a hard sell as sustainable products are seen as pricier overall. “That is the ‘sustainability premium’,” Prof. Charlene tells us. “Why should I spend more money to pay for them as a consumer?”

The green message hasn’t yet reached everyone; a 2022 Singapore Environment Council (SEC) study found that one in two consumers will avoid choosing products with sustainable packaging if it costs more.

“We cannot assume that all our consumers are sustainability conscious,” Prof. Charlene says. “That’s why the value proposition cannot just be ‘the product is sustainable’.”

Marketing beyond the sustainability value proposition

What other value propositions does Prof. Charlene suggest? First, “find an additional value proposition over and beyond sustainability.”

Saying “we’re a net zero product” isn’t compelling enough as a sales message. You need to dig deeper: “Adding a value proposition above and beyond ‘greener’ may help push the products more effectively to consumers,” Prof. Charlene says. “It may not be directly relevant to being green, but relate to properties that consumers still value.”

She cites AlterPacks as an example, a company that makes robust, reusable, and biodegradable food containers made from food waste. Alterpacks’ containers are “actually a lot pricier than what [clients] are using,” Prof. Charlene says. “[Alterpacks CEO Karen Cheah] managed to convince buyers because they are hardier than the usual containers. They are more heat resistant. They are more durable. They can be used several times before they are composted.”

Second: tell a compelling sustainability story. “People are visual – they want to see where their impact is on their purchase,” Prof. Charlene explains.

“For example, some stores tell you that they use ocean plastic in the manufacture of their products. They’ll have a concrete demonstration in-store to show you how much ocean plastics you are using by buying a swimsuit, for example.”

Relationships and persuasion to drive sustainable change

A lot of the work in marketing sustainability is understanding how to persuade people: “communicating what sustainability is to them in layman’s terms, and not use too much jargon because people get switched off,” Prof. Charlene says.

Students learn the importance of “converting multiple stakeholders within the organisation to become more green… it’s not just about convincing consumers,” she tells us; future corporate leaders “need to be able to use relationships to convince people why sustainability is the right agenda to pursue.”

This is what Prof. Charlene tries to achieve in her new Marketing Sustainability Class. Persuasion is the foundation of exercises like the change management simulation, where MMS students will apply real world tools used in change management such as conduct town halls, send emails, and organise training sessions to convince various organisational stakeholders to become more sustainable,” she explains.

A multi-stakeholder approach also informs the module’s sustainability communication exercises. “A big challenge in sustainability is how do you communicate to the layman? Nobody is going to pore through all your sustainability reporting,” Prof. Charlene tells us.

In this exercise, students must create content that explains sustainability concepts in a clear, concise, and engaging manner “using graphics, even using influencers and social media to spread bite-size messages in ways that people can understand,” Prof. Charlene explains. “That helps them communicate simply, clearly, and in a way that’s interesting and appealing.”

Teaching marketing sustainability for tomorrow’s CMOs

Prof. Charlene will start teaching “Marketing Sustainability” to MMS students in November 2024: “They are going to become marketing leaders in the future, and some of them already have some experience,” Prof. Charlene says.

“I am glad that I am able to be in a position to educate the next level of leadership – I am very privileged to be able to inspire and hopefully train a few CMOs along the way. If they manage to make a positive difference in the world. I’ll be super proud of them.”

Find out more about the Master of Science (MSc) in Marketing Science (MMS) here.

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