Marketing in the Anthropocene

For over half a century, marketing scholars have sought to address environmental challenges. The first marketing article to explicitly engage with environmental concerns appeared in 1971 ( Kassarjian, 1971 ), marking the beginning of a series of attempts to reconcile marketing with sustainability. Over the years, we’ve seen the rise—and fall—of ecological marketing ( Henion & Kinnear, 1976 ), green marketing ( Ottman, 1993 ), environmental marketing ( Polonsky & Mintu-Wimsatt, 1995 ), environpreneural marketing ( Menon & Menon, 1997 ), and, more recently, sustainability marketing ( Belz & Peattie, 2012 ; Kemper & Ballantine, 2019 ; Sheth & Parvatiyar, 2021 ). Each of these approaches promised to align marketing with environmental goals, but the reality is sobering. Despite five decades of sustainability discourse in marketing, the logic of economic growth remains sacrosanct, and with it, our collision course with planetary boundaries remains unaltered.