IRMA-International.org: Creator of Knowledge
Information Resources Management Association
Advancing the Concepts & Practices of Information Resources Management in Modern Organizations

Sustainability and the UK’s Major Food Retailers: Consumer Concentric Cause Marketing Writ Large

Sustainability and the UK’s Major Food Retailers: Consumer Concentric Cause Marketing Writ Large
View Sample PDF
Author(s): Peter Jones (University of Gloucestershire, UK), Daphne Comfort (University of Gloucestershire, UK)and David Hillier (University of Glamorgan, UK)
Copyright: 2014
Pages: 21
Source title: Sustainable Practices: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Information Resources Management Association (USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-4852-4.ch042

Purchase

View Sustainability and the UK’s Major Food Retailers: Consumer Concentric Cause Marketing Writ Large on the publisher's website for pricing and purchasing information.

Abstract

This chapter reviews how the UK’s leading food retailers are incorporating sustainability into their corporate identities and marketing strategies. The chapter begins with an outline of the characteristics of sustainability, a discussion of the relationships between marketing and sustainability, and a brief description of the structure of food retailing within the UK. The chapter draws its empirical information from the sustainability material on the top ten UK’s food retailers’ corporate websites and an observational survey conducted in these retailers’ stores in the town of Cheltenham in the UK. The findings reveal that while the top ten UK food retailers claimed strong corporate commitments to sustainability, such commitments are poorly reflected at the point of sale within stores where the dominant marketing messages were designed to entice customers to consume rather than to encourage them to develop more sustainable patterns of shopping behaviour. This leads the authors to offer some critical reflections on the sustainability agendas being pursued by the UK’s leading food retailers. More critically, the authors argue that the UK’s leading food retailers have constructed sustainability agendas which are driven largely, though not necessarily exclusively, by their own commercial interests rather than by commitments to sustainability. As such, these retailers can be seen to be looking to accommodate both strategic long-term commitments to sustainability as well short-term operational decisions to offer customers competitive prices within what they see as genuinely consumer concentric marketing strategies.

Related Content

Mukul Bhatnagar, Nitin Pathak. © 2024. 16 pages.
Mitushi Singh, Mukul Bhatnagar. © 2024. 32 pages.
Vikas Sharma, Sanjay Taneja, Kshitiz Jangir, Kirti Khanna. © 2024. 15 pages.
Preet Kanwal. © 2024. 17 pages.
Kapil Sharma, Yogesh Kumar, Rajiv Khosla, Sanjay Taneja. © 2024. 16 pages.
Sanjeev Kumar, Mohammad Badruddoza Talukder, Firoj Kabir, Fahmida Kaiser. © 2024. 15 pages.
K. K. Kishore Mishra, Swati Priya, Syed Sajid Hussain, Swati Gupta. © 2024. 17 pages.
Body Bottom