Business, Brands and Sustainability

Roderick White

WARC Hot Topics are the essential guide to debates in and around marketing. This paper explores the key issues surrounding sustainability, with onward links to related papers on WARC and the Web.

Business, Brands and Sustainability

June 2003
'Sustainability' started life in the 1980s as an almost purely environmental concept, but has moved on to include the full range of aspects of corporate social responsibility. As a result, perhaps the best available definitions of sustainable development are:
  • 'Ensuring a better quality of life for everyone, now and for generations to come' (UK Government)
  • 'Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs' (UN's Bruntland Commission, 1987)

This all means, in effect, that sustainability now embraces the combined fields of...

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