Challenges for marketers in sustainable production and consumption

As one of the biggest issues facing today’s global society, sustainability cuts across all areas of production and consumption and presents challenges for marketers who attempt to understand and incorporate sustainability in their everyday practices [1,2,3]. Evidence suggests there is increasing pressure from stakeholders around the social and environmental responsibilities of companies, including how products are sourced and manufactured, and marketed to consumers [4]. Recent events have illustrated unacceptable and unethical practices in production, for example unsafe working conditions in factories creating fast fashion items, prompting a media backlash against the companies involved [5]. One of the many challenges for marketers is to differentiate their sustainable brands from competing brands and to communicate this to consumers; and for consumers to recognise what makes a brand more sustainable [6,7]. The interface between companies and consumers in communicating sustainable production and consumption is reflected in contact points such as advertising, labelling and social media [7]. Such points are key providers of information concerning how products are sourced, manufactured and used [7]. However, consumers themselves are faced with a bewildering range of product choices and increasing information, which raises questions about links between sustainability in production and consumption.
For this Special Issue, we invited papers which address production, consumption, and/or the relationship between them in a context of sustainability. We accepted and published fifteen papers which form the content of this Special Issue. These papers are introduced below.