Sustainable marketing transitions: insights from service-dominant logic

Although sustainable marketing has nowadays become imperative and multiple studies have proposed frameworks to cope with it, the notion seems to be still in its infancy, with fragmented perspectives. Furthermore, several works suggest that, to be genuinely sustainable, marketing should be oriented to systems transitions (intended as transformations), a renowned research topic in innovation studies. With a transition orientation, for example, companies could re-think their roles, relationships, practices, and beliefs – among others – and develop sustainable marketing initiatives. This paper aims to support the design and analysis of marketing initiatives oriented to sustainability transitions by proposing an operational framework to assess what we call a “sustainable marketing transition” orientation. To do so, we develop a theory adaptation work leveraging Service-dominant logic and reconciling and synthesizing insights from various research streams. We present an illustration of the application of our proposal (the “BIOCHELAV” project) for a company that produces and commercializes cleaning products.