sustainable marketing
The Industry's Role in a Sustainable Future
Sustainable Marketing: The Industry’s Role in a Sustainable Future reframes marketing from “growth engine” to system-shaper: a profession that can either accelerate overshoot or help make sustainable choices normal, attractive, and scalable. It starts by facing marketing’s complicity in environmental and societal harms, then offers a practical path to change—equipping marketers to embed sustainability into everyday decisions (strategy, briefs, creative, media, measurement) rather than treating it as a bolt-on. Reviewers capture both the provocation and the practicality: “a pointed evisceration of a marketing industry” paired with “a practical route map… into day-to-day reality.”
The book’s distinctive contribution is a shared operating language—most notably the Sustainable Marketing Compass—that helps teams avoid greenwashing and “carbon myopia,” translate sustainability into CFO-credible choices, and build capability across organisations. Endorsements describe it as “a blueprint for saving marketing as a profession,” arguing it shows “another destiny possible… in which marketing makes sustainable solutions… desirable,” and even calling it “an essential handbook… practical guidance… measurable frameworks.”
AMA Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award — Sustainable Marketing: The Industry’s Role in a Sustainable Future was recognised by the American Marketing Association with the Leonard L. Berry Marketing Book Award, highlighting its contribution to advancing marketing thought and practice.
Business Book of the Year 2024 (Shortlisted) — The book was also shortlisted for a major Business Book of the Year award, underlining its relevance beyond marketing and into wider leadership and strategy conversations.
The Sustainable Marketing Compass is a four-step strategic planning framework designed to embed sustainability “at the heart of marketing” by placing the UN SDGs at the centre of decision-making and then translating that intent into practical marketing choices. It moves from UN SDG Alignment (link marketing to organisational and global goals), into Strategic Foundations (resetting how marketing thinks: ReDefine Success, ReThink Value, Real People, Efficiency & Governance), then into Activation Pillars (Purpose, Partnership, Participation, Performance), and finally into Data Models & Testing so teams can learn, improve and avoid greenwashing pitfalls with evidence-led iteration.
What makes the Compass unusual is not just the model, but the way it has travelled: it was launched as an open-source framework and rapidly became shared infrastructure for the profession. Within 24 hours of launch it had over a quarter of a million views, signalling pent-up demand for a common language and practical tools marketers could actually use. Since then, it has been adopted and referenced across agencies and brands, and it is now featured in courses delivered by major institutions including Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), the CIM and the IPA—evidence that it’s not just a thought piece, but a teachable operating framework.