Sustainable Development in Marketing, Strategy and Communications –
the UN’s SGD

For many it is an already usual issue. For others it is new. For us it is a guideline, which allows to breathe more freely in business. The often too narrow focus on an individual company’s strategic and operational details deserves a corresponding orientation.

MARK-MAN supports the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals. Our clients can benefit from a careful alignment. Thus, the development guideline for states can be translated into prosperity promoting business activities.

Correctly adjusted, they not only generate sustainability, but foster the development of a corporation evolutionary.

In West European countries many people have luckily achieved a high standard of living, where hunger and poverty on average remain on a considerably lower level than that of developing countries. Education and social security systems perform on higher levels.

Even though, the map of wealth in Global North has white spots. In Global South, in contrast, the status of economically privileged people is impressively higher than that of their fellow countrymen.

The big picture – a common world

From a European business perspective, connection to the worldwide targets for sustainability are promising.

Where for example goal 8 demands for decent work and economic growth, this also provides orientation in the competitive field. No company has by itself to deliver more than others. But having the target in mind, it shows the direction for all, as it is about simultaneous economic growth.

When goal 11 calls for sustainable cities and communities, it is obvious, which tremendous chances for all business activities exist.

The target components industry, innovation and infrastructure, goal 9, are rich sources for win-win situations.

Shaping the future clearly

Strategy and communication are encouraged most beneficial, where the basic intention is to find the general orientation. To formulate and express the guideline, to what one will adhere. That a vital future is based on exactly this is obvious. A few examples:

• Employer branding to stand out in increasing competition for reliable employees needs a clear guideline to convince.
• Brands, which intend being important for large groups of people also in the future, need as a counterpart of performative substance a similar potent form of visibility, fair and square.
• Trust and story telling may contribute honestly to attitudes where emotions boost business, where an atmosphere is created, in which people love to stay.

Integrating different communities

Just a small deficit of such big goals, developed by most diverse nations, is that their entanglement only little focuses on the behavior of individuals. The interconnection does not express explicitly how comprehensive initiatives shall be managed, which are not directed by states. Whereat we in the western industrial countries have huge capacities to manage creativity at our disposal and are experienced in bearing responsibility together.

MARK-MAN intends to contribute to reach the Sustainable Development Goals by supporting our clients in opening those perspectives, which are sustainable and from whose expansion all may benefit. And which make our world a better place.

Providing orientation in a global landscape is difficult, but grateful. It satisfies the demand for doing right, yours and ours as well. Hence, it is good to integrate the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals into the individual company practice.

More (German text): Der Marketingkosmos und die Kultur der Verantwortung