Places where people matter: the marketing dynamics of Fairtrade Towns

Purpose The purpose of this study was to understand how Fairtrade Towns, a relatively new but rapidly expanding phenomenon that promotes social business in terms of the consumption of Fairtrade products, operate as a form of place-based marketing network. This paper, which underpinned a Keynote Address delivered at the Second Biannual Social Business Conference, explores how Fairtrade Towns combine the ‘people’ dimension of Fairtrade marketing with a place-based perspective. Methodology This project applied grounded theory and gathered data through long-term ethnographic involvement in one Fairtrade Town initiative, and interviews with 29 key participants across 11 other Fairtrade Towns. Findings The dynamics of Fairtrade Towns operating as marketing systems went far beyond just conventional ethical consumption behaviours driven by concerns for other people in other places. Elements of consumer citizenship linked to civic engagement, the exploitation and development of local social networks and social capital, and connections with local place identity all combine to create a form of place-based community marketing with a unique ability to connect people in producer and consumer communities for social benefit. Contribution This study demonstrates the need to understand phenomena such as Fairtrade Towns, not as abstract marketing systems, but as activities and processes driven by, and concerned about, real people in real places. It contributes to the growing appreciation of the need to understand particular aspects of social business from a multidisciplinary perspective. Keywords: Fairtrade, Ethical marketing, Consumer citizenship, Place marketing, Grounded theor

Social marketing: a fresh approach to promoting sustainable lifestyles?

The discipline of social marketing involves the application of the philosophy, perspective and toolkit of the commercial marketer to key social policy issues. It is a relatively young, but rapidly growing, discipline. Many of its early successes have been in areas relating to personal health, where it has been used to influence individuals' behaviour to quit smoking, drink less, or exercise more. Social marketing initiatives have been less prevalent in environmental issues, although it has been applied to the promotion of behaviours such as energy saving and recycling. This paper looks at the potential for social marketing to promote more sustainable lifestyles, and to encourage new partnerships between commercial organisations and policy makers. Recently there have been calls from the United Nations for approaches to promoting sustainability which rely less on generating fear and guilt amongst consumers, and which are better at understanding consumers and engaging with them. Social marketing offers a ready-made approach that is ideally suited to answer this call. It also has the potential to encourage constructive public-private partnerships because it frames key sustainability challenges in a language and logic that businesses can relate to. However, the promotion of sustainability represents an issue of a size, scope and complexity beyond anything that has yet been tackled using social marketing. It therefore represents a major challenge to those who practice and promote social marketing, and to the policy makers for whom it represents a novel way of approaching the promotion of sustainable lifestyles. This paper combines insights from the evolution of social marketing, writings on sustainable lifestyles, and experience from the field of environmental marketing to explore some of the theoretical, cultural and practical challenges that the social marketing of sustainability will entail

Understanding the environmental impacts of household consumption: a holistic systems approach

A great deal of the environmental impact of our industrial system is determined by decisions taken, and behaviour undertaken, within private households. There have been many detailed studies of the environmental impacts of specific products such as cars or washing machines, and one or two ambitious attempts to compare the environmental impacts of a wide range of product types against a range of environmental criteria (for example the excellent EIPRO project). Such studies tend to consider the impacts of products on a ‘one-at-a-time' basis and do not provide a holistic picture of how the composition, behaviour and evolution of households can affect the specifics of environmental impacts. Developing a more holistic understanding of how households consume, and the impacts that consumption has, will help in the development of products and strategies that allow businesses, policy-makers and householders to all play a part, in an integrated way, in the quest to moderate the environmental impacts of household consumption. This paper reviews existing knowledge on the environmental impacts of household consumption and explores some approaches to building integrated, systems-based models that could allow a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of these impacts to emerge. As well as helping to make the nature and complexity of these impacts easier to understand, this approach is useful in highlighting the current areas of strength and weakness in our research-generated knowledge-base. This in turn will be helpful in terms of developing future research strategies and framing research questions