Integrating Consumer Preferences into Sustainable Offerings: Marketing Innovations for a Green Economy

Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce a new Special Issue, ‘Integrating Consumer Preferences into Sustainable Offerings: Marketing Innovations for a Green Economy’, in the journal Sustainability.  

This Special Issue focuses on understanding how marketing can effectively align consumer values with sustainable production. Its purpose is to identify, analyze, and highlight marketing strategies and tools that not only respond to consumers’ growing interest in environmentally responsible products and services, but also actively shape consumer behavior toward more sustainable choices.

The scope of this Special Issue encompasses a wide range of topics and interdisciplinary approaches. It encourages submissions that leverage data analytics, advanced technologies, and behavioral insights to develop marketing frameworks capable of guiding consumers toward eco-friendly offerings. By examining how to integrate consumer preferences into product design, communication, and branding strategies, this Special Issue aims to support a global shift toward a green economy. Ultimately, it seeks to provide actionable insights and best practices that help stakeholders create meaningful market transformations, fostering sustainable growth and long-term consumer trust.

As societies around the world face pressing environmental challenges, from climate change to resource scarcity, the role of consumers as active participants in the green economy has never been more crucial. Increasingly, consumers are seeking products, services, and brands that align with their values, particularly in terms of environmental responsibility, social equity, and long-term resilience. Yet, translating these broad aspirations into consistent purchasing behaviors and sustainable consumption patterns remains a complex task.

Marketing innovations stand at the intersection of consumer expectations and sustainable production efforts, offering effective pathways to bridge knowledge gaps, shape consumer attitudes, and guide behavior toward more eco-friendly options. By leveraging advanced analytical tools, data-driven insights, and creative communication techniques, marketers can illuminate the benefits of sustainable offerings, increase transparency and trust, and ultimately make sustainability an integral part of consumers’ decision-making processes. These marketing initiatives have the potential not only to respond to existing consumer preferences, but also to cultivate and strengthen new ones, fostering a market environment in which sustainability is both valued and accessible.

This Special Issue seeks to illuminate the multifaceted relationships between consumer preferences, marketing innovation, and sustainable production. Our goal is to generate a robust body of work that advances theoretical understanding, provides empirical evidence, and offers actionable insights to help businesses and organizations align sustainable offerings with consumer interests, paving the way toward a genuinely green economy.

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but is not limited to) the following:

• Marketing strategies that effectively influence consumer choice toward sustainable products, services, and lifestyles.
• Integration of consumer insights into sustainable product design, development, and distribution, including the role of consumer feedback loops.
• Application of digital tools and emerging technologies (e.g., artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, blockchain, big data analytics) to better understand and respond to evolving consumer sustainability preferences.
• Empirical studies on how marketing messages, campaigns, and branding initiatives can shape environmental awareness, willingness to pay, and consumer trust in green offerings.
• Communication strategies for conveying sustainability credentials, such as life cycle assessments, certifications, or eco-labeling, and their impact on consumer perception and engagement.
• Behavioral experiments and consumer psychology research examining the drivers and barriers of adopting sustainable consumption patterns in different market segments.
• Case studies that highlight successful integrations of marketing innovation with consumer-driven sustainability approaches, illustrating best practices and lessons learned.
• Multidisciplinary approaches linking marketing, public policy, and environmental management to enhance the overall effectiveness and scalability of sustainability initiatives.

By focusing on how marketing can actively integrate consumer preferences into sustainable offerings, this Special Issue aims to shed light on the mechanisms that lead to more effective, responsible, and enduring pathways toward a green economy. Through these contributions, we hope to inspire a richer dialog between academics and practitioners and ultimately support the worldwide effort to create markets where both consumers and producers can thrive sustainably.

We look forward to your valuable contributions.

Dr. Eun Joo Kim
Prof. Dr. James A. Busser
Dr. Minji Kim
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• sustainable consumption
• consumer preferences
• green economy
• marketing innovation
• eco-friendly offerings
• green choice
• innovative marketing strategies