B2B Marketing and Sustainability

Sustainability has become a key priority for organisations across business markets and networks, yet understanding how it is enacted within and across business relationships remains an important challenge. At the heart of these relationships are humans: people who interpret sustainability, make decisions, negotiate priorities, develop relationships, and translate sustainability ambitions into practice. This book explores the human side of sustainability in business-to-business (B2B) marketing, foregrounding the role of human actors in relationships, organisations, networks, and wider systems.

Across five parts, the book brings together conceptual perspectives and empirical studies examining how managers, employees, and other actors understand and enact sustainability in diverse B2B contexts. The chapters address topics including sensemaking, sustainable business relationships, circularity transitions, competence development, employee behaviour, humanistic management, governance, social sustainability, and sustainable procurement. Together, the contributions reveal sustainability as a multilevel and relational process shaped by the interplay between human agency, organisational practices, business relationships, and broader network and institutional contexts.

The book will be of interest to researchers, academics, and students in B2B marketing, business relationships and networks, and sustainability, as well as managers and practitioners seeking to understand how sustainability is interpreted, negotiated, and implemented in practice.