The sustainable marketing canvas: a new decision-making tool

Abstract

Marketing has made little impact upon environmental, social and economic sustainability due to a conceptual and level-of-analysis fragmentation. This acts as a barrier for theoretical development and for coherent, sustainable action. Yet, firms and society desperately need answers for which marketing is uniquely poised in offering. Providing order to the complexity is what marketing managers need. One way to do this is to marry notions of marketing sustainability with “normal” marketing in a decision-making tool. A Sustainable Marketing Canvas is introduced where the 7P’s are fused with the Triple Bottom line. VAUDE GmbH & Co, a sustainable outdoor brand in Germany, is the case example. Strategic marketing decisions from CEO Dr. Antje von Dewitz and her management team are structured into the canvas to prove its relevance to practitioners, its simplification of complexity and the inclusion of different levels of analysis