Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
advantage over others in the marketplace; marketing advantage could also be achieved through
recognition in, or membership of, various green award schemes. In line with marketing as a
consumer-focused management practice, business commitment to sustainability was also seen as
meeting changing customer expectations and demands regarding improvements in an
organization's environmental and social performance.
Aside from consumers, the interdependence of tourism at destination level also encouraged
businesses to maintain good-neighbourhood policies with other stakeholder groups, such as
residents and local non-tourism businesses; another reason highlighted by Middleton and
Hawkins (1998) for business engagement with sustainability. The fi nal three reasons comprised
ensuring compliance with business to business procurement policies (for example, for an
hotel, ensuring that the hotel met the responsible business criteria of a specifi c tour operator in
order to become one of its preferred suppliers), meeting responsible membership criteria to join
trade associations and tourist boards, and fi nally, the better conservation of business assets and
resources over the longer term. Some 15 years later, the ten reasons proposed by Middleton
and Hawkins (1998) still resonate, with Goodwin (2011) emphasising the building of trust,
reputation and customer loyalty, and the lifting of employee morale amidst similar reasons for
business engagement with the sustainability agenda.
The macromarketing perspective
It is also important to move beyond the managerial perspective of marketing to better challenge
its precepts and conduct. For example, social marketing claims 'a grander vision' for what mar-
keting is about than the classic generation of transactions by placing the quest for behavioural
change at the heart of marketing (Andreasen 2003: 299). In this section we examine the contri-
bution of macromarketing to our knowledge of sustainability and marketing for responsible
tourism. Macromarketing addresses how micromarketing - or managerial level marketing -
impacts on society, how society infl uences the broader macro-system and how these two systems
interact. On this basis, sustainability becomes very much part of the macromarketing territory
and ripe for investigation.
At the core of this way of thinking about marketing is the concept of the dominant social
paradigm (DSP). The DSP is the set of norms, values, beliefs and behaviours that form the most
commonly held world view or mindset within a culture. It is pervasive to the point that people
scarcely notice or query the infl uence of the DSP on their daily lives. The DSP within which
our lives are organized in Western societies is one driven by the imperatives of capitalism,
economic growth and the accumulation of wealth, and the values of consumerism, individualism
and dominance over nature in an anthropocentric value system (Emery 2012; Kilbourne 1998;
Kilbourne, McDonagh and Prothero 1997; Varey 2010). It is argued that the reinventions of
marketing for sustainability have operated within this DSP even if the intention was to make
'sweeping and substantive changes' (Kilbourne 2010: 109). Recently experts in consumer
behaviour have written of consumerism experiencing 'a period of well-earned malaise' and that
'the future of global consumption must remain the object of questioning on economic, cultural,
environmental and moral grounds' (Gabriel and Lang 2006: 5). Despite the debates, calls to
action and minority alternative lifestyles, consumption as a way of life remains the driving
principle of the Western DSP (Varey 2010: 115).
Thomas Friedman as cited in our opening salvo referred to the prevalence of short-term
incentives driving people and businesses towards short-term benefi ts to the detriment of the
longer term. This touches on Hardin's (1968) classic tragedy of the commons as iterated in
the tourism (e.g. Goodwin 2011) and the marketing (e.g. Polonsky 2011) literature. Because
