ABSTRACT
The new millennium is providing many challenges to marketing as a management discipline and an academic field. Old certainties have become strained as markets continue to globalize, as existing mass markets dissolve in a tide of individualism, and as the power of the Internet continues to reshape how we communicate and consume. Perhaps the most profound challenge for marketing lies in playing a role in moving industries and economies towards a more environmentally (and socially) sustainable path. In 1987 the Brundtland Report, Our Common Future (WCED, 1987) put forward the case that our current production and consumptions systems were not sustainable, in a way that governments and businesses found hard to ignore. By the early 1990s the majority of the world’s governments had committed to pursue sustainability following the Rio Earth Summit and the publication of Agenda 21. Most of the world’s largest companies followed suit by signing up to the International Chamber of Commerce’s Charter, or through their own environmental or corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies. The scale of the challenge has been
illustrated in the political arena by the lack of substantive progress observed by the time the second Earth Summit was held in Johannesburg in 2002. Within the corporate sector this was reflected by the Green Wall phenomenon in which well-intentioned environmental initiatives have stalled in the face of implementational difficulties (Shelton, 1994).
