Marketing and Society

Course goals

Learning objectives
At the end of the course the student is able to:

• Understand and apply sustainability marketing techniques to the advantage of organizations and society;
• Synthesize sustainability marketing theory and cases to identify key challenges, and to develop interventions to tackle these challenges;
• Evaluate societal marketing literature to create a report, for the sake of instructing, informing, predicting, advising or inspiring practitioners;
• Critically reflect upon traditional and sustainability marketing issues and measures. 

Content

Marketing is the study and management of value creation for customers through satisfying needs and creating relationships to ultimately generate also value for the organization. However, this marketing concept has faced criticism of being only profit-oriented, manipulative, and exploitative, leading new marketing concepts to emerge. This course focuses on one of these concepts: sustainability marketing, which refers to planning, organizing, implementing, and controlling marketing resources and programs to satisfy consumers’ wants and needs, while considering social and environmental criteria and meeting corporate objectives.

Thereby, the sustainability marketing concept adopts the position that marketers have a greater responsibility: economic, societal, and environmental. In line with raising awareness of related issues, value creation for all stakeholders – ranging from political activism to sustainable packaging – has become a critical effort in many companies. However, with the sustainability marketing approach gaining global traction, issues like greenwashing raise the need for critical reflection. This course takes a holistic perspective from traditional marketing tools to critical evaluation of novel applications to prepare students to leverage these tools while also consciously reflecting on their purpose and impacts.  

This course includes a group project in which students solve a case study addressing a real-life societal marketing problem and prepare a report as a team. To ensure sufficient understanding of the underlying theoretical marketing concepts, a written exam tests the learning success (late midterm).

Format
Lectures + team project. The course includes a series of lectures in which we will discuss the challenges and concepts mentioned above. 
The team project includes literature research, desk-research, in-depth interviews and observations, reporting, progress presentations, reflections, and a final presentation and report.

Geo students
This course is open to Geo students, who can indicate their interest to enrol in the course by emailing: studentaffairs.geo@uu.nl, before 28 June.

Students of the master’s programme Sustainable Business and Innovation can contact Simona Negro (S.O.Negro@uu.nl) for enrolment in this course.

In case online access is required for this course and you are not in the position to buy the access code, you are advised to contact the course coordinator for an alternative solution. Please note that access codes are not re-usable meaning that codes from second hand books do not work, as well as access codes from books with a different ISBN. Separate or spare codes are usually not available.