Improving Sustainability Marketing in Retail Business - Partioaitta Oy

The global change has affected people’s behavior and people have started to care more about the environment. This has increased the number of sustainable products on the markets. Customers are favoring environmentally-friendly products and thus, protect the environment. It is important to know how and where the products come from. The aim of the thesis is to get to know sustainability marketing and to understand the effects of sustainability marketing and its possibilities. The final goal is to produce a development plan for the case company and offer suggestions on how they could improve their sustainability marketing in order to persuade more customers to buy sustainable products from them. The thesis is conducted deductively and both qualitative and quantitative research approaches will be used while conducting the research. Primary data was collected with an online survey from the case company’s customers. Secondary data, which was collected from various types of information, including books, articles and Internet sources, supports the primary data. In the thesis, the 4P’s and 4C’s of marketing theory along with PESTEL analysis are used to gain a deeper understanding of sustainability marketing as a part of marketing. Also, basic customer decision-making process and the idea of buying sustainable products are presented to support the research. Since an aim of the thesis is to produce a development plan about sustainability marketing for the case company, a SWOT-analysis is also used. The research results indicated that websites are the main source of information about products’ state of environmental friendliness. Important result of the research was also, that customers do not get enough information about products’ environmental aspects. These and other results of the research helped create a development plan for the case company