Towards sustainability: achieving marketing transformation - a retrospective comment

Re-reading 'Towards Sustainability: The Third Age of Green Marketing', the logic behind the three stage framing of the evolution of the relationship between marketing and sustainability, and the analysis of the challenges this poses for marketing practitioners and scholars, still seem both realistic and relevant. This is perhaps also confirmed by the fact that Shelby Hunt, a doyen amongst marketing academics, used them as the basis to set up his own contribution to the marketing and sustainability debate in the February 2011 special issue of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (Hunt, 2011). The notion of Shelby Hunt writing the lead paper in a special issue of JAMS dedicated to sustainability and marketing is something that would have had a fantastical ring to it ten years ago, and is a measure of the extent to which sustainability thinking has infiltrated into the marketing academy