First UBC blog… no, first blog ever.

Hello reader of my humble blog,

Without long introduction I want to share some thoughts about sustainability marketing (SM). Feel free to correct me at any point.

From what I understood so far, on of the most important purposes of SM is to shape people’s minds to ‘be green’ which, of course, means many things. However, when you address the same thing to firms, it becomes a lot more difficult. Marketing seems to be a very small portion of the “going green” machine, and it can affect mostly consumers, but not so much the producers. In order to change companies and their products it requires cooperation of engineers, accountants, business process re-engineering specialists, etc. Some companies can change quickly, but the bigger ones can’t. And the bigger ones are usually the most harmful ones.

Also, the big part of SM is good economic welfare. There are 20 countries (G20) in the world that can actually afford sustainability movements, but the rest don’t have resources for that. There are issues such as hunger, lack of jobs, sweatshops, etc., enormous amount of issues that could not be resolved for years. Those countries are so far behind that they don’t want to think about sustainability, they want to feed themselves first.

Sustainability as a concept seems big in Canada. I would assume it is big in the US and Europe. I don’t know how big though. However, even here it varies depending on the area. It is like Apple Macintosh computers. They make a lot of noise when the come out, they are great, reliable, good in the long-run, but they are still a tine share of the world computer market. Some people only heard of them, but don’t know what they are or know them only by the iPhone. Just like sustainability is know mainly by the CO2 emissions for example.

That’s the initial thought. I hope later it develops in something more specific.