Sustainable Marketing
Marketing scholars who believe business can be better for people, planet, and profits
The Sustainable Marketing & Innovation SIG (SUSTSIG) is a vibrant community of scholars who believe that the business of business is more than business. To this end, we strive to understand how sustainability and marketing can work together. Sustainable marketing aims to is all about embracing wins. Marketers who embrace sustainability will look at have a positive influence on not only the firm’s financial position but also on the people and planet.
We organize events, promote scholarship about sustainability and the teaching of sustainability. For more details see what sustainability is and what we do, investigate some relevant resources, and find out who our executive team are. We have another website which we update with call for papers, new paper alerts, items of interest to the community, amasustsig.org.
What is sustainability?
Sustainability is commonly defined using the explanation in the United Nations (UN) Brundtland Report in 1987:
Sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Note that of course sustainability is about preserving and helping the environment to thrive, but it is about much more. It is vital that the needs of people are met too. Practically stated, sustainability is anything that works towards the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These are 17 goals to make the world a better place. For more on the UN SDGs see THE 17 GOALS | Sustainable Development
How Can Marketing Be Sustainable?
Marketing can be sustainable by promoting the better world envisaged by the SDGs. For example, SDG 12 focuses on Responsible Consumption and Production which is central to marketing. Business can provide Decent Work and Economic Growth (SDG 8) as well as some firms delivering on more specific SDGs, like SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being and SDG 4: Quality Education. All marketers can work on making the world fairer by tackling Reduced Inequalities (SDG 10) and Gender Equality (SDG 5).
Innovation has a special role in sustainability. If we want a planet which serves the needs that exist, for example, to bring people out of poverty, we need new and better ways of approaching problems related to the environment and society, such as Climate Action (SDG 13) and Life on Land (SDG 15). Innovation is especially related to SDG 7 Affordable and Clean Energy and SDG 9 Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure.
Note that while philanthropy can play a crucial role in addressing the SDGs, the core focus of sustainable marketing is to achieve win-wins. Business currently faces the challenge of finding ways in which various stakeholders, including owners, can benefit from improved ways of operation. Thus, many in the world of sustainability talk of focusing not only on profits but on the triple bottom lines (Environmental, Social and Economic achievements) or the 3Ps which typically means People, Planet, and Profit but many prefer People, Planet, and Prosperity to get beyond the limitations of profits.
What Do SUSTSIG Members Research?
The specific research interests of our SIG members span numerous topics, including: demonstrating the business case for sustainability, driving innovation in a circular economy, empowering entrepreneurs at the base of the pyramid with marketing knowledge, understanding drivers of consumer decision making, linking marketing to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and clarifying when and how sustainability can serve as a basis for competitive advantage. SUSTSIG members often work together to promote this exciting field, and we provide a way of networking for those researching in the area.
How Does Sustainability Impact Our Teaching?
Teaching is critical to helping marketing become more sustainable. We teach how business can benefit a range of stakeholders.
The SIG facilitates collaborative exchange of teaching resources and shares ideas of best practices in sustainable marketing teaching.
How Is Sustainability Impacting Business?
Despite any political winds, sustainable business is in a healthy state. Consumers reward firms that are more sustainable. Businesses adopt sustainability reporting, certifications, certify as B Corp, or register as benefit corporations or similar legal entities. Employees, especially high-potential young people, look to work for socially and environmentally responsible businesses. The future of business is to be sustainable.
Practicing marketers work towards a more sustainable future. CSO (Chief Sustainability Officers) and CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) often work together to achieve joint goals. Firms often report on their targets and achievements. (See the G&A Institute for details of the rise of corporate sustainability reporting, Sustainability Reporting Trends).
What Else Does SUSTSIG Do?
Our key meetings are at the AMA Winter and Summer Conferences. At these, we organize scholarly sessions and social events and aim to create ways for those interested in sustainability in marketing to get together. The sessions we organize at the AMA Conferences bring in perspectives not only from scholars but also from practitioners to discuss the relevant and current challenges that shape the discourse around sustainable marketing.
Would add a sentence about the sessions we organize at the AMA Conferences that specifies how we bring in perspectives not only from scholars but also from practitioners to discuss the relevant and current challenges that shape the discourse around sustainable marketing. We also recognize those who have contributed to sustainable marketing.
Jagdish N. Sheth | Honorary Chair
Emory University
jagdish.sheth@emory.edu
Professor Jagdish Sheth is a renowned scholar and internationally recognized thought leader.
He has published more than 300 research papers and more than 30 books on various disciplines and topics. His insights on global competition, strategic thinking, geopolitics, and emerging markets are considered revolutionary. Through the Madhuri and Jagdish Sheth Foundation and the Sheth Family Foundation, Professor Sheth, his wife, and his family have given to over 50 community, academic, and healthcare organizations in Atlanta and around the world.
Neeraj Bharadwaj | Co-Chair
University of Tennessee
nbharadwaj@utk.edu
Neeraj Bharadwaj (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin) is Proffitt’s Professor in Marketing, Charlie and Carolyn Newcomer Faculty Research Fellow and Neel Corporate Governance Center Research Fellow at the Haslam College of Business.
Bharadwaj’s scholarly pursuits combine academic rigor with practical relevance, and his current research addresses sustainability, innovation, branding and livestream retailing. His published articles appear in such leading outlets as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, International Journal of Research in Marketing and Journal of Product Innovation Management, among others.
He is often recognized for his research, including being named recipient of multiple Haslam Summer Scholars Program Research Awards and a Harold H. Maynard Award finalist for an article published in the Journal of Marketing. He is also an award-winning teacher, including being recognized among the Top 40 Undergraduate Business Professors by Poets & Quants in 2017, and as recipient of the Chancellor’s Excellence in Teaching Award in 2022.
He is the founding member of the Sustainability Research Network, an interdisciplinary community of scholars at the Haslam College of Business and beyond who strive to understand the business implications of firms’ environmental, social and/or governance initiatives.
Previously, he served as a consultant for government clients and multinational corporations, and on the faculty at Babson College, Temple University, University of Chicago and University of Texas at Austin. Prior to earning his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, he worked in brand management at Miller Brewing Company.
Neil Bendle | Co-Chair
University of Georgia
neil.bendle@uga.edu
Neil Bendle is a professor of marketing at Terry College of Business. An accountant by training, fellow of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (FCCA), prior to academia he was Director of Finance at the Labour Party in the UK. He teaches sustainable marketing strategy and sustainable business to college students and executives.
He has published on sustainability, metrics, analytics, and political marketing. He co-authored Marketing Metrics and The Customer Asset. Please visit his Marketing Thought website (https://neilbendle.com/) for weekly posts on issues relevant to marketing and sustainability.
Anders Gustafsson | Vice-Chair for Awards
Norwegian Business School
anders.gustafsson@bi.no
Anders Gustafsson is a professor of marketing at the Norwegian Business School. Dr. Gustafsson is conducting research on customer satisfaction and loyalty, management of customer relationships, and consumer behavior. His research focus now is staging and understanding customer experiences (e.g., acts of firms, impact of customer emotions, goals, and various senses, and ways to capture the latter using objective measures) He received the Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award.
Sundar Bharadwaj | Vice-Chairs for Strategic Initiative
University of Georgia
Dr. Bharadwaj is the Coca Cola Company Chair Professor of Marketing, at the Department of Marketing, Terry College of Business, University of Georgia. He studies the effects of marketing strategies on firm performance, societal outcomes, and societal harm using econometrics, deep learning, and machine learning techniques. He also uses these techniques to develop measures from firms’ textual legal filings. He is particularly interested in the impact of GenAI on marketing practices and employment. His research topics include:
- Generative AI and marketing capabilities
- AI and marketing employment
- Marketing and the Financial Interface
- Climate marketing strategies
- Sustainability, new products and growth
- Shareholderism and Stakeholderism
- Marketing Communication and Healthcare Prevention
- Marketing capture and Societal Harm
Charles H. Noble | Vice-Chair for Strategic Initiative
University of Tennessee
Charles Noble is the Henry Distinguished Professor of Business in the Haslam College of Business at The University of Tennessee. He currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS), a FT-50, leading journal in the Marketing field. He previously served as EIC of the Journal of Product Innovation Management (JPIM), the premier research journal in the areas of new product development and innovation. His research interests focus generally on marketing strategy and innovation, including market entry strategies, strategic orientations and front-end design and development processes, as applied to both products and services.
Dionne Nickerson | Vice-Chair for Finance
Emory University
Dr. Dionne Nickerson is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. Her research focuses on the impact of sustainability, corporate social responsibility (CSR), and inclusion on marketing strategy. Her work has been published in Harvard Business Review, Journal of Marketing, and Journal of Marketing Channels. In 2024, Dr. Nickerson was a finalist for the AMA Foundation Robert Lusch Early Career Research Award. Her 2022 Journal of Marketing publication was selected as a finalist for the 2022 AMA/Marketing Science Institute/H. Paul Root Award and 2022 Shelby D. Hunt/Harold H. Maynard Award for its contributions to marketing theory and practice. In 2018, she received the Emerald/EFMD Outstanding Doctoral Research Award in Marketing for her dissertation work.
Dr. Nickerson was born and raised on Chicago’s South Side. She earned her Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She also holds an A.B. in engineering (Brown University) and an MBA (Providence College). Before becoming an academic, Dr. Nickerson worked in technology consulting, advising clean technology start-ups funded through the EPA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program on marketing strategy, and taught English through the Teaching Assistant Program in France (TAPIF).
Antje Graul | Vice-Chair for Communications: Newsletter Content
Utah State
Dr. Antje Graul is an Associate Professor of Marketing at Utah State University. She teaches Sustainability Marketing and Digital Marketing and leads various research projects in the areas of sustainability and consumer decision making. Her research examines consumer decision-making and consumer adoption of sustainable products and services, such as collaborative consumption objects or electric vehicles. She published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Business Research, and Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. She is the USU Campus Director of the National Science Foundation Research Center ASPIRE, which is a $50 million dollar funded international collaborative program across multiple universities and industry partners to spur adoption of electric vehicles. Prior to her academic career, she spent two years working with BMW Germany focusing on marketing communications and public relations.
Atul Kulkarni | Vice Chair for Communications: Community Development
Southern Connecticut State University
Dr. Atul Kulkarni is a Professor of Marketing at Southern Connecticut State University. He teaches classes related to Sustainability Marketing and Innovation in the MBA and undergraduate business programs and is involved in several research projects at the intersection of technological developments, marketing, consumer behavior and sustainability. He runs a research lab focused on these topics and is also involved in community-level initiatives related to sustainability.
Dana Alden | Vice-Chair for Communcations: Website
University of Hawaii at Manoa
Professor Alden completed his Ph.D. at UT Austin in Marketing and International Business in 1990. His research focuses on cross-cultural consumer behavior, global branding, healthcare marketing, and sustainable marketing. He has published in leading marketing journals such as the Journal of Marketing, the Journal of International Marketing, and the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science. His healthcare decision making appears in journals such as Medical Decision Making, Social Science & Medicine, and Health Psychology.
In line with Professor Alden’s focus on sustainable marketing, he developed and teaches undergraduate and MBA courses in the area at the Shidler College of Business. He also co-founded and co-chaired the AMA Sustainable Marketing and Innovation SIG, served as co-chair of the 2023 and 2025 Research Innovations in Sustainable Marketing Symposium, and currently serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Sustainable Marketing. Finally, he has several research projects underway with colleagues and doctoral students that focus on sustainable marketing strategy in the US and East Asia.
As Journal of Sustainable Marketing EIC, Professor Alden looks forward to working with scholars and practitioners around the world to develop and diffuse evidence-based theory and applications that address the existential sustainability issues threatening our world.
Ludovica Scalco | Vice-Chair for Social Media and Liaison to DocSIG
University of Manchester
ludovica.scalco@manchester.ac.uk
Ludovica Scalco is a Lecturer (tenure-track) in Marketing at the University of Manchester. She teaches research methods and responsible marketing and holds a PhD in Business Administration (Marketing) from BI Norwegian Business School. Her award-winning research examines a wide range of corporate sustainability strategies and practices and their effects on consumer responses, firm performance, and stakeholder relationships. Using both qualitative and quantitative approaches, she also explores how these practices shape consumer and societal well-being beyond the firm’s immediate stakeholders.
Crystal Reeck | Vice-Chair for Events
Temple University
Dr. Crystal Reeck is a tenured Associate Professor at the Fox School of Business, where she also serves as the Associate Director of the Center for Applied Research in Decision Making. She completed both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Stanford University, and she holds a Ph.D. in psychology and neuroscience from Duke University.
To trace the processes underlying consumer behavior and decision making, her research uses a range of methods including traditional behavioral approaches, psychophysiological measures, eye-tracking and MouselabWeb, and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Her research investigates a number of topics, including self-control, emotion and emotion regulation, social processes, and choice architecture interventions. She has published her research in peer-reviewed journals that span multiple fields, including Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Marketing, Nature Human Behavior, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Dr. Reeck has won several awards for her research as well as her teaching.
Varsha Jain | Vice-Chair for Membership
MICA
Prof. Varsha Jain is the AGK chair professor of marketing at MICA, India. She is the deputy editor of the Journal of Consumer Behaviour (“A” Journal) and an associate editor (AE) at three “A” journals: Psychology and Marketing, the Journal of Consumer Marketing, and the Australasian Marketing Journal, and co-edited more than 12 “A” category journal’s special issues. She received the best AE award from JCB in 2022, is on the advisory board and editorial board of several A*/A journals, and co-track chairperson at the Advertising Academy of Marketing Science, USA, the annual conference, 2025, and co-chairperson, special session, American Marketing Association Winter Conference, 2024. She has authored over 180+ publications, including multiple papers in A* and A journals, including the European Journal of Marketing, the Journal of Advertising Research, and the Journal of Business Research, and more than 12 global books with legends of marketing such as Prof. Jag Sheth and Prof. David Aaker.
She has received over 28 international and national awards and gold medals in scholarship. The most recent is the Research Award – Professor, Springer Nature, India, 2025. In her global research career, she is a visiting guest at Emory Business School, Atlanta, Michigan State University, University of Washington, USA, a visiting scholar at Greenwich University, London, and The Medill School, Northwestern University, USA. Her interests include new technologies, Artificial Intelligence, consumer behavior, luxury, and sustainability.
Xiaoxu Wu | Vice-Chair for Teaching Resources
Colorado State University
Xiaoxu Wu is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Colorado State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Marketing from Michigan State University. Her research centers on two main areas: the influence of purpose-driven marketing on customer-company relationships, and the impact of customer political ideology on consumer attitudes, behaviors, and decision-making processes. Her work not only explores these distinct fields but also highlights their broader implications for business strategies and firm-level outcomes. Xiaoxu’s research has been published in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and her dissertation on customer political ideology and feedback behavior received the 2024 AMS Mary Kay Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Award.
Saloni Firasta Vastani | Vice-Chair for Corporate Affairs
Emory University
Dr. Saloni Firasta Vastani joined the faculty in 2016 after an extensive career in corporate America. In her 20-year career, Vastani has developed expertise in business strategy, pricing, and analytics. She has experience in the travel and technology industries in both domestic and international markets including South America, Asia, and Europe. She has solved business problems through insightful data analytics, grounded research, and leading cross-functional teams to implement the strategy. Notable clients include Bain Capital, Riverside Private Equity, BCD Group, Deloitte, and The Weather Channel.
Vastani’s research interests are focused on pricing strategy and innovation management. She is interested in how buyers consciously and subconsciously process price information, remember it, and use it to make purchase decisions. Her work is published in both academic and business journals. Vastani teaches a course in Pricing Strategy and Analytics. She is a frequent speaker in both, industry and academic environments on Revenue Management Strategy, Pricing Analytics, and Leadership.
Over the years, Vastani has served in leadership roles at Fortune 100 companies such as American Airlines and Verizon. Vastani started her career at American Airlines and was responsible for bringing financial discipline into American Airline’s processes. At Verizon, she successfully launched B2B products into the market and was the pricing leader over Internet products. She has also been a part of M&A deals and founded a start-up company. Vastani is passionate about community service and serves as an advisory board member for JScreen, a public health initiative by Emory University and the Marcus Foundation. Previously, she served as an advisory board member for Persian Initiative at Michael C. Carlos Museum and Diabetes Leaders Forum at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).