Intro to Sustainable Marketing

As I get close to the end of my undergrad education, one of the final courses I’ve decided to take is Sustainable Marketing with Dr. Sara Baskentli. Being born and raised in the PNW has perhaps allowed me to have a bit more insight into sustainable practices than the average person. Things like recycling, reducing single use plastics, and eating a plant based diet are all behaviors that I’ve had the luxury of being exposed to throughout my youth. However, there are so many aspects to sustainability and its relation to marketing that I have yet to learn. I’m eager to dive into this course and learn as much as I can about how I can be a sustainable marketer and make a difference within my career.

As a warmup for the course, students were asked to calculate our ecological footprint, carbon footprint, and water footprint. Calculating your carbon footprint is something that many students have been exposed to throughout our education, but it never went beyond the initial shock factor behind finding out just how earths it would take to sustain one’s buying practices. However, paying attention to our ecological, water, and slavery footprint is something that is new to me and has me questioning my own personal buying habits, as it should.

First, let’s discuss my ecological footprint. After taking the quiz, my results explained that we would need 2.7 earths to sustain my current buying practices if everyone in the world were to adopt to the lifestyle I currently carry out.

The image below shows details of my ecological footprint in relation to my individual buying habits.

From this information, I can gather that most of my unsustainable buying behaviors live within the purse of (assumingly) non-essential goods. This doesn’t necessarily come as a surprise. I’ve adapted to a vegetarian diet for the last five years, and taking it a step further to be vegan when possible. Having most of my consumption category fall into “goods,” I would also claim this as an accurate description of my buying behaviors. Being a college student, and especially now being an unemployed college student, buying sustainable goods is not often accessible or convenient. For example, I would typically choose to shop at Winco or the Dollar Tree when picking up both essential and non-essential items because of the pricing strategy of both the stores. Growing up, I was raised to be relatively frugal. This meant choosing the off-brand cereals and shampoos to save a few coins. However, as I have continued my education and learned more about the back ends of business, the reason the stores in question can maintain their position as low price leaders is because there are often price cuts further up the line of supply chain. Someone, somewhere, is paying the full price for my product, even if I am not.

From this, I’ve developed a somewhat sustainable lens of viewing my consumption habits, while also being excruciatingly aware of my constraints as a consumer. One of my personal hobbies and ways in which I’ve found immense personal and creative satisfaction has been within makeup artistry. Whether consumers are aware of it or not, the beauty and personal care industries can be just as dirty as their drugstore counterparts, even if the packaging is minima and aesthetically pleasing. The greenwashing of the beauty industry is a topic that I’ve done a bit of research on in the past, but in order to switch my consumption habits to be more sustainable, much more research needs to take place.

Throughout this course, I am going to keep my eye on my buying behavior within a few product categories, focusing mainly on food and beauty products. with food, I try to adapt to being vegetarian and even vegan when possible, however these choices are not always convenient. Especially throughout my college years, I’ve become increasingly lazy when it comes to making purchase decisions that are sustainable. I want to challenge myself to stop buying non-vegan items like ice cream, cheese, yogurt, etc, either cutting those out of my diet as much as possible or switching to vegan alternatives. For the months of April, May, and June, I want to attempt to watch my buying habits and stop my own purchasing of non-vegan foods, or at least keep track of how I do. Through my blog posts, I’m going to keep track of every food item I purchase, as well as evaluate the sustainability of not only the product itself but also the distribution centers in which I am making my purchases.

In addition to this, I want to challenge myself to not buy any makeup! I don’t usually spend too much money on this category in general, but because it is my main hobby and a major source of personal gratification, I often times allow myself to be lenient with my purchases in this category. With our world being inthe midst of a pandemic and all non-essential businesses closed, you would assume making the decision to not buy any new makeup might come naturally. However, in late March I did make a relatively bigger purchase from an online small business, so I know I will likely want to purchase again in the coming months.

My progress of these goal will be monitored throughout future blog posts to come, and evaluated as I learn more about sustainable marketing and ways in which I can implement more sustainable practices into my own life.