Going Beyond Green: The “Why and How” of Integrating Sustainability Into the Marketing Curriculum

Teaching sustainable marketing practices requires that curricula advocate a “triple bottom line” approach to personal and marketing decision making, emphasizing requirements for a sustainable lifestyle, company, economy, and society. These requirements include environmental/ecological stewardship (maintenance and renewal of “natural capital”), social stewardship (equitable distribution of resources, human, and community well-being), and economic stewardship (valuing financial continuity over profit). In this article, the authors suggest how marketing educators might incorporate these sustainability principles into marketing pedagogy. Toward that end, the authors (a) offer a formal definition of the term sustainability , (b) examine the current role of sustainability in marketing strategy at the firm level, (c) present a brief history of academic literature relevant to this topic and review current initiatives at academic institutions, (d) offer resources for integrating sustainability into marketing curricula, and (e) propose and describe the implementation of an MBA-level marketing elective dedicated to the topic of sustainability.