Journal of Strategic Marketing

Bridging Theory and Practice in Sustainability Marketing

Bridging Theory and Practice in Sustainability Marketing

The environmental crisis is transforming consumer lives, altering how people work, travel, eat, socialise and spend their leisure time (see Elhoushy, 2025; Elhoushy & Font, 2025; Jang & Lee, 2025; King, 2026). Decades of unparalleled consumption across food, fashion, entertainment, digital services, hospitality and travel have contributed to escalating levels of resource depletion and waste, with extreme weather, such as rising temperatures, increasingly becoming part of everyday life and creating climate vulnerabilities (Liu et al., 2026). These developments highlight the need for marketing research to move beyond intentions and attitudes to examine how sustainability is enacted, constrained, negotiated and experienced in real-world contexts.

Notably, despite growing consumer awareness of sustainability, the attitude–behaviour gap remains a persistent challenge (e.g. Carrington et al., 2010). Consumers may endorse sustainable values and recognise the need for behavioural change. Yet translating these values into everyday practices remains constrained by affordability, convenience, infrastructure and competing priorities (Eckhardt et al., 2010), as consumers engage in neutralisation (Hosany & Serdiuk, 2025) and other mechanisms that enable unsustainable consumption. Sustainability challenges involve stakeholders beyond consumers and include businesses, policymakers and communities. Consequently, bridging theory and practice in sustainability marketing provides opportunities for reciprocal knowledge creation and theoretically informed problem-solving. Real-world sustainability problems can inform new theorising, while theoretical insights can help practitioners design, evaluate and scale more effective interventions.

In this context, important questions on sustainability marketing arise. For example, how can we bridge the gap between sustainability theory and the realities of everyday consumption? How can marketers and policymakers move beyond encouraging consumers to “make better choices” towards creating the conditions that enable sustainable living? How can theoretical insights translate into meaningful and actionable sustainability practices? How can research move from measuring stated intentions to observing actual behaviour and marketplace outcomes? How can sustainability interventions be designed, tested and evaluated in the contexts in which consumers, firms, communities and policymakers actually operate?

Importantly, bridging theory and practice requires methodological pluralism. Qualitative research can illuminate consumers’ lived experiences, practices, meanings and vulnerabilities; survey research can identify relationships, mechanisms, heterogeneity and boundary conditions; and experimental and quasi-experimental studies can establish causal effects of marketing interventions. Empirical research using real-world data can further connect sustainability theory with marketplace realities. Mixed-methods and interdisciplinary approaches are particularly encouraged where they provide stronger explanations of how sustainability transitions unfold in practice.

Our special issue invites research that explores the intersection of sustainability theory and practice, particularly work that examines the lived realities of sustainable consumption and the role of marketing in enabling meaningful behavioural and systemic change. We welcome conceptual, qualitative, quantitative, experimental, empirical, mixed-methods and data-driven research. We particularly encourage studies that connect rigorous theoretical development with real-world problems, demonstrate causal or consequential effects where appropriate, and generate actionable implications for firms, policymakers, communities and consumers.

Research Topics

Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following thematic areas:

1. Consumers, everyday practices and sustainability transitions

• How is climate vulnerability reshaping consumers’ identities, aspirations, everyday routines, lifestyles, leisure, entertainment and consumption practices?
• How do social influence, social norms, communities and cultural contexts shape environmental sustainability?
• What are consumers willing to sacrifice in pursuit of sustainability? How much are consumers willing and able to pay for environmental sustainability, and which other stakeholders bear these costs?
• Can environmental constraints stimulate new forms of repair, reuse, sharing and non-consumption?
• What new forms of consumption, access, sharing, circularity and non-consumption may emerge as environmental constraints intensify?

2. Firms, brands, innovation and circular consumption

• How can organisations translate sustainability theory into products, services, business models and customer experiences that facilitate sustainable consumption?
• How can firms design products, services and systems that make sustainable practices feasible, affordable, accessible and convenient?
• How can marketing strategy enable repair, reuse and circular consumption and product life extension?
• How can marketing contribute to systemic changes rather than placing disproportionate responsibility for sustainability on individual consumers?

3. Sustainability, inequality and systemic transformation

• How can sustainability marketing move beyond individual behavioural change towards systemic transformation?
• Who bears the costs of sustainability transitions, and how are these costs distributed across consumers, firms, governments and other stakeholders?
• How do inequalities in income, resources, capabilities, infrastructure and access shape consumers’ capacity to participate in sustainability transitions?
• How can marketing contribute to the design and evaluation of sustainability policies and systemic interventions?

4. Digital technologies, marketing communications and behavioural change

• How can digital technologies, artificial intelligence, digital platforms and marketing innovation facilitate transitions towards sustainable consumption?
• How do social media, influencers, online communities and digital platforms shape sustainability perceptions, norms and behaviours?
• How can digital marketing facilitate behavioural change without increasing consumer burden, surveillance, manipulation or inequality?
• How can marketers move beyond persuading consumers to behave sustainably towards creating the conditions that enable sustainable behaviour?

5. Real-world evidence, experimental research, and new methodological approaches

• Real-world sustainability behaviour: How can transaction data, purchase records, online reviews, social media, mobility data, energy and waste data, and other behavioural datasets reveal what consumers actually do, rather than what they say they intend to do?
• Experimental and quasi-experimental interventions: What is the causal impact of sustainability marketing interventions, including pricing, incentives, labels, communications, nudges, product design and infrastructure changes, on actual consumer and marketplace behaviour?
• Climate and environmental disruptions as natural experiments: How do heatwaves, extreme weather events, resource constraints, environmental regulations and other real-world disruptions change consumption patterns, sustainability practices and adaptation behaviours?
• Data-driven discovery and theory development: How can large-scale digital, observational, longitudinal, geospatial and computational data be used to uncover new sustainability phenomena, identify previously unrecognised mechanisms, and develop or challenge existing marketing theories?
• Mixed-methods approaches to bridging theory and practice: How can qualitative insights, quantitative analysis, experiments and real-world behavioural data be integrated to explain not only whether sustainability interventions work, but why, for whom, under what conditions and with what practical consequences?

We welcome research that connects rigorous scholarship with real-world sustainability challenges and offers meaningful implications for marketing practice. We invite conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions that bridge sustainability marketing theory with practice and create conditions to enable sustainable living.

The Special Issue will leverage the Academy of Marketing–GAMMA Joint Symposium on “Bridging Theory and Practice in Sustainability Marketing,” (https://2027gmc.imweb.me/26 ) to be held at the 2027 Global Marketing Conference in Tokyo, as an important platform for engaging scholars working at the intersection of sustainability marketing theory and practice. Authors submitting to the symposium will receive developmental feedback and will be encouraged to further develop their work for potential submission to the Special Issue. Submission to, and participation in, the conference will not be a prerequisite for submission to the Special Issue.