Green Marketing and Sustainability: An Integrative Review and Typology of Their Relationship

Green marketing and sustainability are frequently treated as interchangeable in both scholarship and practice, yet they describe different scopes of action. Green marketing is largely an operational lever centred on environmentally framed products, claims and communications, whereas sustainability marketing denotes a broader, long-term and societal orientation organised around the triple bottom line. This conceptual conflation obscures how the two are actually related. The present study is an integrative literature review of work indexed in Scopus and Web of Science between 2021 and 2026. Studies were screened for direct relevance to the green marketing and sustainability relationship, and their findings were synthesised thematically rather than aggregated statistically. The review shows that recent research links green marketing to sustainability through six recurring domains: green products and green innovation; green branding and green brand equity; green communication, advertising and greenwashing; green consumer behaviour; digital and artificial-intelligence-enabled green marketing; and circular-economy, Sustainable Development Goal and strategic-orientation concerns. Drawing on these themes, the study develops a typology that classifies how green marketing contributes to broader sustainability objectives, ordering the domains by their level of analysis and by whether their orientation is mainly instrumental or transformative. The typology in turn supports a green-to-sustainability marketing continuum on which green marketing appears as one developmental stage within a wider sustainability trajectory. The study closes with implications for theory and practice.