transparent, organizations may set themselves up for controversy if they preach greater sustainability than they are actually engaging in. This is why we suggest that as organizations take on sustainability initiatives, that they do so cautiously, that they state their successes and set-backs as part of a journey towards greater sustainability, and that they take care not to over promise and under deliver. Interface Flor provides an excellent example of a sustainable marketing organization. A Sustainable Marketing Organization: Interface flor Interface Flor, is the world's largest manufacturer of modular carpet in the world and a leading example of a sustainable marketing organization. The founder, Ray Anderson, experienced an epiphany in 1994 after which he could no longer run his business as he had for the previous two decades. He has referred to himself as a "plunderer of the earth" (The Corporation 2003), and since his epiphany has worked toward the goal of eliminating "any negative impact Interface has on the environment by 2020" (http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Company.aspx). The firm has also worked with organizations in their supply chain and around the world to help other corporate leaders with their own sustainability journeys. As people at Interface began working towards becoming a more sustainable organization, they recognized the importance of the global ecosystem to the existence of their business, and to the future of the world. Their ultimate goal now is to become a "restorative enterprise" (http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Our-Journey.aspx), meaning that Interface will ultimately make a net positive contribution to the global ecosystem. Interface Flor distinguishes their sustainability initiative from a "green" initiative. Sustainability highlights a systems-perspective that affects operations and guides decision-making at all levels of the organization, including relationships with suppliers and customers (http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Sustainability-in-Action.aspx). While Interface fields a team to drive and measure progress toward greater sustainability, the sustainability goals set for the organization are embraced, enacted, and pushed by all employees. Interface lists ten areas that the company focuses on to achieve their sustainability goals. These include reevaluating raw materials, biomimicry, working toward carbon neutrality, combating climate change, engaging employees, reevaluating energy use, using lifecycle assessments, eliminating waste, closing the loop by turning waste into valuable, reusable products, working with supply chain partners, and addressing greenhouse emissions associated with transportation. These areas seem to provide a basis for innovation, measurement and action. Examples are discussed briefly below. InnovationBiobased raw materials involves the search for alternatives to oil-based materials, especially renewable resources. They are currently making commercial modular carpet out of polylactic acid (PLA) fibers derived from maize and other starch containing agricultural plant materials and waste products. These fibers can be produced without using heavy medals, with less water than petrochemical polymers, and waste products can be composted. (http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Sustainability-in-Action/BioBased-Raw- Materials.aspx) Biomimicry is using nature as an inspiration for sustainable designs and processes. Interface has used this principle to help develop lines of carpet tiles that incorporate "organized chaos" into their design, and thus fit together in seemingly random and seamless patterns, a critical need for carpet tiles that are not all replaced simultaneously. Interface also used biomimicry to develop a carpet tile adhesive-free installation system that releases no volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and can be installed without damaging underlayment. (http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Sustainability-in-Action/Biomimicry.aspx) Action Interface engages employees and tries to improve their lives. One way they do this is to create a healthier and safer work environment, through actions already discussed. They see benefits for their organization from these efforts in the form of increased productivity, higher retention rates, and a culture of innovation. They measure and track employee engagement with a yearly survey of all employees. They organized a program called Cool CO 2mmute, where employees calculate their own carbon emissions from commuting, and Interface splits the cost of the offsets with them. In addition, since 2002, Interface has calculated and offset the carbon emissions from company cars, and since 1997, from business air travel. (http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Sustainability-in-Action/Supply-Chain.aspx); (http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Sustainability-in-Action/Employee- Engagement.aspx) Measurement Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) involves detailed analysis and evaluation of raw material extraction and processing, manufacturing, transportation and distribution, use, reuse, and maintenance, and recycling or final disposal with the aim of reducing raw materials use, cost and waste and increasing recycling, reuse and value added production. LCA is applied to all their products (http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Sustainability-in-Action/Life-Cycle- Assessment.aspx) Interface developed Mission Zero, which commits them to eliminate any negative impact the company has on the environment by 2020. Part of this is taken care of by reducing their carbon emissions, and purchasing carbon offsets for those they cannot reduce. Interface also started a program called Cool Carpet in 2003. This program measures the carbon footprint of the carpet using life cycle analysis (LCA), which looks at every part of the carpet's life cycle from rawmaterials to manufacture, shipping, and disposal. They then purchase carbon offsets to balance the footprint. (http://www.interfaceglobal.com/Sustainability/Sustainability-in-Action/Cool- Carpet.aspx) In working toward their sustainability goal, Interface not only engages every employee in the organization, they also provide information and opportunities for every partner in their value chain to engage in sustainability efforts. In addition, they are at the forefront of manufacturing and climate change policy issues, and continuously push for proactive management of all aspects of organizational operations. 4. What is sustainable consumer behavior? Sustainable consumer behaviors (acquisition, use, and disposition processes) are those that mirror and complement the behaviors of sustainable businesses. Such behaviors seek to minimize the use of virgin natural resources, increase the use of recycled, reused and repurposed resources, reward value chains organized around sustainable principles through ongoing exchange, and engage in co-creative processes of value production with sustainable marketing organizations. From a managerial perspective, key differences between sustainable consumer behavior and a conventional understanding of consumer behavior are that sustainable consumer behaviors explore the benefits of market offerings that emphasize use value over display or status values and look for ways to transcend common property challenges. For example, consumers interested in more sustainable consumption take account of a wide range of criteria in their purchases of food, cleaning products, toiletries, furniture, and even building products. Common examples are preferences for Fair Trade and organic food, and environmentally friendly cleaning products, e.g., Seventh Generation or Green Works, and toiletries that are not tested on animals. Some consumers are experimenting with novel resource sharing schemes such as car and bicycle sharing offered by either commercial or governmental entities. Some consumers also favor local, independent shops and producers, e.g., Burgerville, USA. Studies in both North America and Europe find that consumers are increasingly willing to compromise on price, brand, convenience, and in some cases, product performance in order to ensure that their purchases are in line with sustainability principles (McDonald et al. 2009, 140). To contend with common property resource depletion problems, sustainable consumer behavior looks to various third-party verifiers (e.g. forestry products certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council and seafood certified by the Marine Stewardship Council) to support a sustainability journey. Rather than just focusing on the immediate benefits in making purchase decisions, consumers also take the product lifecycle costs and effects into account, including conditions of sourcing, lifetime energy requirements, and disposal facilities. This being said, consumers most often do not apply sustainability principles consistently across product categories. In the end, they may sacrifice sustainability attributes for more conventional considerations (Bartiaux 2008). In short, sustainable consumption practices in some sectors andsome countries are well developed and actively pursued. In other sectors, this is not the case (McDonald et al 2009, 143). While product service offerings have increased dramatically, problems of product/service availability, choice and information constrain more sustainable consumer behavior (Newholm and Shaw 2007), suggesting many opportunities for marketers to provide effective information, better product choices, and improve the distribution of more sustainable product lines. In terms of information, it seems that rather than desiring detailed analysis of all the possible sustainable purchasing criteria, consumers interested in sustainability want simple advice from trusted, independent sources, e.g, the British website, which.com, the Fair Trade label, or perhaps as in the Clorox example, the Sierra Club. These days, third party certifications are often necessary to create a climate of trust around firm sustainability claims. In the absence of this sort of information, consumers may ignore green or ethical criteria altogether, or simplify the process into a buy/do not buy decision. Overall, the simpler the information supplied (providing it is from a trusted source) the more likely it is to be incorporated into sustainable consumer decision making (McDonald et al. 2009, 143). However, the proliferation of sustainability certification schemes and labels including private label schemes such as that being developed by Wal-Mart (Gunther 2009) or Tesco is currently complicating the information environment for consumers. That being said, the value of "information" should not be overemphasized. There is not, as some have assumed in the past, a linear relationship between information provision and more sustainable consumer behavior as discussed below, and consumers make their own assumptions and assessments of risk (see Szasz 2007). Many firms and consulting companies are still promulgating general segmentation schemes to try to profile the "green" or sustainable lifestyle consumer (Ginsberg and Bloom 2004; http://www.lohas.com/). While these schemes may have their uses, the effort to develop a general segmentation scheme is not the best approach to encourage more sustainable consumption. This is because marketing sustainable consumption is not like the marketing of other goods and services and cannot be approached in a traditional way. This is clearly seen by the longstanding and overall low levels of uptake of green and other sustainable products and services and the enduring "gap" between pro-environmental values and purchase and consumption behaviors. There are two main reasons for this. One lies in the nature of consumer lifestyles. There are two aspects to the lifestyles issue. First, is the finding that contemporary lifestyles rather than being coherent and unified are instead partitioned. Thus, a young mother may be highly motivated to ensure that her new baby consumes environmentally benign, locally sourced, chemical free, organic foods for health reasons, but at the same time may drive a large gas guzzling, polluting, and non-recyclable SUV because of perhaps misplaced concerns for the safety of that same child. Moreover, it is quite evident that consumers will rarely accept products and services that make their domestic routines more 'rigid' in temporal or spatial scheduling, or that they feel are regressive in terms of everyday standards of comfort and convenience (Shove 2003). They will instead prefer those products and services that give them greater flexibility in performing domestic tasks. For example, promotion of resource 'pooling' as an environmentally or socially beneficial alternative to divisible and privatized consumption is likely to face opposition becauseit makes life less flexible and constrains individuals' alternative uses of their time and other resources (Spargaren and van Vliet 2000, 67). The second, and more challenging issue is that much consumer behavior is organized in terms of routines. More formally stated, much behavior falls into the domain of what social scientists sometimes call practical reason (Sahlins 1976), practical consciousness (Giddens 1991), or dispersed practice (Warde 2005). These are matters of taken-for-granted habit and are not directly influenced by inputs of novel information. Thus in affluent consumer cultures when we are cold we turn a thermostat; when dark we flip a switch to light a room; when bored we power up an electronic diversion; when dirty we jump in a warm bath; and, when we run short of bread, we hop in a transport conveyance powered by non-renewable energies to run to the store, and so on. Most of us never give these actions a second thought; they are mindless; and we are disconnected from the shared but largely invisible social and environmental costs of the private benefits we derive from these acts of consumption. The other main reason why marketing sustainable consumption cannot be approached through traditional segmentation and targeting strategies lies in the way in which many of the goods and services implicated in unsustainable consumption are provided to consumers. A good many products and services depend upon the presence of pre-existing expert systems that constrain alternative choices, or render them expensive. "Once the citizen-consumer has been 'connected' to the water works, the sewage system or the electricity grid, the consumer has become a 'captive' consumer. Captive consumers cannot just shift from one system to another without losing resources (money, knowledge, skills) that have been invested in the present networks" (Spargaren and van Vliet 2000, 64). Further, every time a consumer makes use of these expert systems in exchange for money, the systems are reinforced. And it is not just mundane resources like water, sewer or power that are implicated. Most products and services are still produced and marketed based on a linear production model that makes it difficult if not impossible to return or recycle obsolete or broken items back into the production process without incurring incremental costs. The loops are not closed; consider the example of used batteries for instance. These expert systems, sunk costs and incremental costs of change, prevent consumers from moving freely between different systems of provisioning, even where other more sustainable options are available, which often enough there are not. So even if people are striving for more sustainable lifestyles and patterns of domestic consumption, the possibilities offered or not by collective marketing or governmental systems of provisioning are of strategic importance. As Spaagaren and Van Vliet (2000) point out, when concern for more sustainable living encounters low levels of sustainable innovation in systems of provisioning, the result is a lack of sustainable consumer behavior. On the other hand, consumers will only accept more sustainable products and services under the condition that these innovations 'fit' into the overall organization of their households and lifestyles, which it will be recalled, are partitioned rather than unified (Bartiaux 2008; Spargaren and van Vliet 2000, 65). When modestly priced, convenient and effective sustainable products are offered, like Burgerville burgers, Interface carpet tiles or Clorox Green Works some people will adopt them. Alternatively, when distributed practices are rendered into integrated practices or when practical consciousness is rendered into discursive consciousness through civic and commercial dialogue or through the emergence of communities of practice like those associated with brandor consumption communities (Hobson 2001; Schau, Muniz and Arnould 2009; Warde 2005), consumers also may be motivated to adopt more sustainable alternative lifestyle practices. Researchers have identified some such sustainable communities of practice within affluent consumer cultures. Thus, voluntary simplicity, downshifting, anti-consumption groups, and slow living each have specific and subtly different meanings and relate to slightly different ethically driven projects associated with more sustainable lifestyles. There is also a national inflection to some of these movements with anti-consumption flourishing in the UK and France, and slow living finding resonance in Italy. Voluntary simplicity and downshifting seem to have caught the attention of some in the US (Neholm and Shaw 2007; e.g., www.newamericandream.org ). As a result of the emergencies of these communities of practice, an issue in sustainable consumer behavior concerns whether and to what extent sustainable consumption should be conceived of and/or promoted as a form of social action. Some argue that movement of more sustainable products into the mass market risks reducing sustainability to a misguided belief that one can shop ones way to a better world, a criticism also leveled at fair trade marketing schemes (Dolan 2005). Such thinkers argue that to retain a sense of social action, there needs to be more co-creation of value between producers, retailers and consumers. This element of social action they see as important to helping to move towards an overall consumer culture in which consumers are willing to contemplate some reduction of overall personal consumption rates in defense of a more sustainable planet and future (Newholm and Shaw 2007, 263). There have been and will continue to be many failures as well as successes in the sphere of sustainable consumption. Sustainable goods and services can be offered in ways that do not fit contemporary consumers' lifestyles because they adversely effect prevailing standards of comfort, convenience, and propriety. Products and services may also be turned down by consumers because their adoption, use and maintenance do not fit with the organization of domestic time, space and lifestyle. Sometimes sustainable products fail at the production line because they are designed and produced from a narrow engineering perspective like the early generation of electric cars. Or well-designed products fail because of their mode of provisioning, for example, when consumers are not acquainted with the channels used such as car sharing services, or when they have lost their trust in the providers as with electric utilities (E7 Working Group 2000; Spaargaren and Van Vliet 2000, 72). Summary In this chapter we discussed sustainable marketing, marketing sustainability, the sustainable marketing organization, and sustainable consumer behavior, providing explanations and examples for each term. First, we clarified that sustainable marketing must render organizational processes transparent to stakeholders, enlist stakeholders in value creation, and, attempt to render product life cycles and value chains benign in their effects on natural and social environments. We suggested that sustainable marketing goes beyond the traditional product, price, place and promotion to include providing triple bottom line benefits, incorporate the social and environmental costs of products throughout the product life cycle, engage in customer co-creation of value andtransparency, and create new distribution approaches that incorporate access, sharing, and alternative models of product use and disposition. Second, we discussed marketing sustainability, the ongoing demonstration that an organization has made commitments to a journey towards general sustainability goals. We cautioned organizations against making false or exaggerated claims about their efforts, and highlighted the importance of clearly stating successes and failures, and being as transparent as possible about the process to facilitate long-term success of this approach. Next we discussed the sustainable marketing organization (SMO), highlighting its commitment to ongoing, measurable improvements in its relationships with its external natural and social environments, as well as to its internal processes. Ideally, SMO's adopt goals and values that are infiltrated into every aspect of the organization, and known and understood by every stakeholder of the organization, including those throughout the value chain. A sustainable marketing organization develops sense making capabilities for capturing and internally disseminating knowledge, while keeping the health of the external natural and social environments in mind. The SMO is characterized by smarter, more efficient, less wasteful use of all resources that contribute to the delivery of market offerings. We also pointed out 10 Steps for Transitioning to a Sustainable Marketing Organization. Finally, we discussed sustainable consumer behaviors. These acquisition, use, and disposition processes that mirror and complement the behaviors of sustainable businesses. Sustainable consumer behaviors explore the benefits of market offerings that emphasize use value over display or status values and look for ways to transcend common property challenges. We highlighted strategies consumers use to attempt sustainable behaviors, such as car sharing, purchasing locally made products, and buying products that have been third-party certified. We pointed out difficulties in changing consumer behaviors. For example, non sustainability is built into the systems of provisioning for many consumables. Further, taken for granted norms of comfort, convenience, and value are resistant to retrenchment. Finally, there is a dirth of offerings that provide substantial improvements in sustainable qualities.

Questions:

Based on your understanding of the article how would you explain to someone what sustainable marketing is? How is it different from conventional marketing?