Hi Siebe, could you restate your question? It is not exactly clear.

Thanks,

-Steve

Hi steven,

I am sometimes a little fuzzy with my formulation. 

Essentially: 

Is a sustainable supply chain a necessary condition for a sustainable marketing approach, based on the definition of both terms I stated above. 

My thought process:

If a product is sustainable in use and disposal. Plus, it has been produced in a sustainable way by the focal company; but the input of the resources to produce it in the focal company have been obtained through a supply chain, where the businesses/activities were not sustainable.

Is the product in the end not sustainable? And will this not be considered as sustainable marketing? Because the cost price might have been higher if all the activities in the supply chain had to meet social and environmental criteria, so input prices for the products would have been higher for the "sustainable company", with the same profit margins, the consumer might not be willing to choose it over competitive products. 

Dear Siebe,

from my point of view your question can be answered by means of environmental economics, especially the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) according to ISO 14040. If the LCA is done in proper way, the first step is the Material Flow Analysis (MFA) along the complete value chain (in the best case for all flows, means materials and energy), followed by the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA), which concerns the assessment of the environmental impacts along the value chain. This analysis needs to include also the supply, the marketing and the use of the product. The result of the complete LCA gives you the answer if your product is environmentally sustainable. If you put additionally the question if the product is not only environmentally sustainable but also competitive, you should combine the analysis also with Life Cycle Costing (LCC), but for this approach doesn't exist yet a methododlogy which is standardised in ISO norms. Generally, for this kind of question was also developed the so called Eco-Efficiency Analysis in Germany, but this methodology is not yet officially standardised as well (see the attachment).

Best regards,

Petra

Hi Siebe, I believe you are absolutely correct.

If you develop a product with sustainability in mind from start to finish considering all of the materials that go into it, how its transported, sold, used and disposed of and communicate all that in a transparent and reproducible method described by Petra, you cannot do a better green marketing job than that.

Keep up the good work!

-Steve

Hello everybody, thanks for the answers; almost all the definitions of sustainable marketing are holistically, it seems that making the supply chain more sustainable is an inherent factor of sustainable marketing as well.. 

The process of creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers in such a way that both natural and human capital are preserved or enhanced throughout. ((Martin and Schouten 2013). 

The resources of upstream partners are necessary to "create" the value in many cases, i would figure. So it seems that looking for sustainability solely inside your own company's borders but neglecting the input from upstream suppliers is shortsighted and not what most authors mean by holistically. 

Because if that would be the case, company's that claim to be sustainable for instance, could just start outsourcing operations to countries where socially and environmentally regulations are not strict, and claim that all of their own operations are sustainable. While in reality, some of the input for their operations are not sustainable, thus the created value in the end is not totally sustainable after all. Which would not be considered as sustainable marketing accourding to autothors like Peattie, Martin and Schouten. At least that is my interpretation of it.