This Tuesday, August 26, professors Dr. Diane Martin and Dr. John Schouten, from Aalto University in Finland, will be presenting at the Sustainable Marketing Seminar hosted by Pontificia Universidad Católica’s Business School. The event is open to all Global Network for Advanced Management members, who will be able to ask questions live during the seminar to the two professors. To register for event scheduled for 6 p.m. EDT, sign up here.

Martin and Schouten have written extensively on consumer behavior, sustainability and marketing. In “Sustainable Marketing”, their latest book, they highlight the power marketing has when facing the issue of how to remain competitive while restoring the Earth’s natural capital and enhancing wellbeing for the global population. 

For professor Diane Martin, her lifelong passion for the natural environment and wilderness led her to reexamine marketing under a greener paradigm, searching for a more sustainable approach when targeting businesses and consumers. “An authentic market position of sustainability is based on meaningful differentiation and can produce payoffs of customer loyalty and expanded markets through new market segments”, she explained.

In their writings, they state that sustainable marketing is key to today’s way of doing business and that it has two main objectives with respect to the environment and social sustainability. The first being that this way of marketing means working in a way such that all marketing processes are environmentally and socially benign. The second points to understanding sustainable marketing as a concept, as a cultural value and set of practices which goal is to help bring about a society in which striving for sustainability is the norm.

In their recent articles they have discussed neomaterialism and its implementation, which requires new marketing practices to build the basis of a more sustainable society.