Architecting Sustainable Marketing: Emotional Intelligence in the Creative Economy

Grounded in consumer psychology and strategic management, this paper introduces the Sustainable Marketing Architecture (SMA) to examine how embedding Emotional Intelligence (EI) at the core of marketing blueprints aligns brand ecosystems with economic, social, and environmental sustainability goals within the creative economy. Operating as emerging conceptual scholarship, this study executes a theoretical synthesis intersecting Goleman’s five EI domains—Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, Motivation, Empathy, and Relationship Management—with brand building, digital technology capabilities, and creative public relations (PR). The framework demonstrates that digital technologies (AI sentiment analysis and VR/AR) act as "EI prosthetics" to dynamically scale brand empathy and manage complex consumer interactions. Creative PR serves as the authentic communicative voice, transforming EI competencies into culturally resonant consumer narratives, conceptually illustrated through qualitative global brand case studies. As a conceptual framework, the SMA has not been quantitatively evaluated using field survey data. Its proposed structural relationships between EI domains, technological levers, and sustainability metrics require future empirical validation through structural equation modeling (SEM) and longitudinal investigations. This paper bridges a significant gap in applied consumer research by shifting the focus from transactional marketing to an integrated, human-centric model that redefines brand resilience through the systematic optimization of emotional metrics.