appeared on the price tag at all? Activities that result in pollution, waste, resource depletion and emissions can represent real costs even when they have historically been externalised from the transaction between company and customer.
Tomorrow ' s marketer may therefore need a broader understanding of value and cost. This does not mean marketers will become accountants or sustainability specialists. No. But we need to understand that pricing decisions will increasingly sit within these realities.
Place: The supply chain is now part of the story
Place has traditionally been about making products available where and when customers want them, from distribution channels and retail to logistics and market coverage.
Again, these fundamentals must remain. However, we must now consider the questions businesses are increasingly facing.
How far has the product travelled? How resilient is the supply chain? Can more inputs be sourced locally? How energy-efficient is distribution? Can products and materials be traced through the value chain? And what happens when climate events interrupt supply?
" Place ", in this case, therefore becomes more than a route-to-market conversation. It expands to include resilience, traceability, localisation, logistics efficiency and environmental impact.
For marketers, understanding the supply chain may increasingly matter because customers, regulators, investors and other stakeholders are asking questions about it.
Promotion: Perhaps this is where marketing faces its biggest test
For years, marketers have been trained to find the strongest possible story about a product or organisation and communicate it persuasively.
Sustainability complicates that because a compelling sustainability story is not necessarily a credible sustainability story. Terms such as green, eco-friendly, sustainable, carbon neutral and responsibly sourced cannot simply become another collection of adjectives in the marketer ' s vocabulary.
Increasing scrutiny of environmental claims means marketers need to understand evidence, substantiation and greenwashing risk. This requires a different relationship
65 MAL74 / 26 ISSUE between marketing and the rest of the organization.
Before saying, " Our product is sustainable," the marketer may need to ask: What exactly makes it sustainable? Compared with what? What evidence supports that statement? Can we substantiate the claim? And are we communicating the full picture or selectively highlighting the most attractive part of it?
Promotion therefore moves from simply asking, " What can we say?" towards asking, " What can we credibly prove?"
What If Every Profession Needs Green Skills?
Today, when we talk about industry-driven green skills development, there is a danger that we are defining the opportunity too narrowly.
The sustainability transition will certainly require solar technicians, energy specialists, EV technicians and professionals working in emerging climate industries. But it will also require accountants who understand sustainability information, procurement professionals who understand responsible sourcing, HR professionals who understand green workforce capabilities, finance professionals who understand climate risk, communicators who understand environmental claims, and marketers who understand how sustainability changes products, markets, customers and value.
Green skills, therefore, shouldn ' t necessarily be a separate subject that students encounter somewhere towards the end of their training.
For the next generation of marketers, it may no longer be sufficient to ask: " Are we creating value for the customer?" They may also need to ask: " Are we creating customer value while destroying environmental, social or economic value somewhere else in the system?"
A product can delight a customer while creating enormous waste. A low price can be attractive while concealing costs elsewhere in the value chain. Convenient distribution can come with a significant environmental footprint. A brilliant campaign can promote consumption patterns that contradict an organization ' s sustainability commitments.
Marketing therefore begins to require something that has been traditionally associated more closely with sustainability strategy: systems thinking. The ability to see the product not simply as something sitting on a shelf, but as part of a much larger system of materials, energy, people, suppliers, communities, customers and, eventually, waste or reuse.
This could have important implications for how we prepare marketing learners. A future-ready marketer may need basic literacy in areas such as lifecycle thinking, circular economy principles, carbon and energy, responsible consumption, sustainability claims, emerging regulation and sustainability data.
Not expert-level knowledge, but enough to ask intelligent questions. Enough to recognise risk. Enough to challenge a claim that cannot be substantiated. And, importantly, enough to sit in a room with engineers, sustainability teams, procurement professionals, finance teams and operations leaders and understand how their decisions eventually affect the customer proposition.
So, if we genuinely want industry-driven green skills development, industry engagement with learning institutions cannot only be about identifying new occupations. Rather, industry can also help institutions understand how existing occupations themselves are changing.
Is marketing future-ready?
I would argue that its fundamentals are surprisingly resilient. Human needs have not disappeared. Neither have segmentation, positioning, consumer behaviour, brand, customer experience, value creation or the 4 Ps.
We don ' t necessarily need to tear up the marketing textbook, but we may need to revisit some of the assumptions sitting underneath it.
The world in which tomorrow ' s marketer will practise is being shaped by climate risk, resource constraints, new regulations, changing consumer expectations, technological disruption and a much broader understanding of corporate responsibility. The marketer of tomorrow must therefore be able to see and understand these dynamics.
Alice Ngatia is a Senior Marketing Executive & Sustainability Specialist with 20 + years of experience in helping brands WIN in the hearts & minds of customers. You can commune with her via email at: Alice. Ngatia @ gmail. com.