Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to contribute to the gap in the literature of digital marketing and sustainability as joint areas of knowledge and thus contribute to the discussion of the use of digital marketing as a tool to promote sustainability. In addition, this chapter was formulated as a guiding question: to what extent can the use of digital marketing contribute to the adoption of more sustainable behaviors by different audiences? The chapter will include an exhibition on the concept and perceptions of digital marketing, sustainable consumer behavior, and the climate crisis. Subsequently, a renewed concept of sustainable digital marketing is presented as an area of joint action that focuses not only on changing consumer behavior in terms of sustainability, but also on changing the mechanisms of production, transportation, materials used and use of non-sustainable resources renewable by brands/organizations.
TopConcept And Perspectives Of Digital Marketing
The internet is strongly related to digital marketing, as it is through it that it grows and develops, however, the complexity of the internet also results in the complexity and fragmentation of digital marketing (Busca & Bertrandias, 2022), such as Inbound Marketing (Halligan & Shah, 2009). Furthermore, digital marketing can also be presented as “online marketing, internet marketing or web marketing” (Desai, 2019), however these terms are more limited, since digital marketing does not concern only online or web content, but uses new ways of developing, such as mobile applications, e-mail, databases, the customer lifecycle (Chaffey & Ellis-Chadwick, 2019) and more recently the growing importance that the metaverse has acquired and its potential use by digital marketing. The metaverse is the combination of “goal”, which means virtual and transcendent, and “verse”, referring to the world and the universe (Park & Kim, 2022), in a simplistic way, it is the virtual that transcends the world and its geographical limitations. In this virtual world, several brands/organizations have bought land where they can host whatever they want, namely the company Tokens.com that intends to generate advertising revenue through a tower in the metaverse (Kamin, 2021), thus opening the door to the growth of the digital marketing strategies developed in this digital world, but which influence decision-making in the real world similar to what has already occurred in other areas (e.g., Duan et al., 2021; Park & Kim, 2022).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Sustainable Digital Marketing: Area that uses all digital platforms and applications, with the purpose of establishing a relationship between the parties involved, considering the need for and importance of immediacy, personalization, interaction, and the relevance of the messages, to communicate sustainable behaviors by organizations/brands and to promote or influence the adoption of sustainable behaviors by individuals.
Sustainable Behaviors: Behaviors adopted by consumers to minimize their environmental impacts.
Climate Change: variation of the climate in an abnormal way, due to the behavior adopted by individuals, which influences the various ecosystems.
Sustainability: Use of resources by present generations without compromising future generations.
Green Consumption: Consumer predisposition to purchase environmentally friendly products, or products with less environmental impact.
Digital Marketing: Marketing actions developed in digital media.
Consumer Behavior: Consumer journey when purchasing a product/service, whether online or offline.