Employees as internal stakeholders in the concept of sustainable marketing : a comparative analysis of European and Asian market

Background. Corporate sustainability has captured the attention of much of the world over the last few years. The idea of sustainability refers to all spheres of the company’ activity, including marketing strategy. Before the company starts addressing sustainable marketing activities to external stakeholders effectively it needs to address them to its employees first. The reasons for that are two-fold. First, employees play a key role in the process of implementation of sustainable marketing strategies and programmes to external stakeholders, and thus they determine their effectiveness. Second, their sustainable behaviours performed in every-day work show that the company truly cares about sustainable development, and sustainable activities are not perceived as just cheap promotional, short-term actions. In this paper we assume that culture may differentiate employees’ attitude towards sustainable marketing activities addressed to them and thus may differentiate sustainable marketing activities undertaken by company managers.

Research aims. To explore sustainable marketing activities used by companies towards employees in Europe and Asia, as well as to identify the differences in the assessment of the scope of implementation of these activities by enterprises operating in the European and Asian markets.

Methodology. The empirical part of the paper is based on research results run among 262 MSMEs (micro, small, and medium enterprises) operating in Poland (a representative of the European market) and Sri Lanka (a representative of the Asian market). The respondents of the research comprised CEOs or CMOs. The research was run in 2016 and 2017. The non-parametric U Mann-Whitney test was used to examine the significance of the differences between the two countries. Factor analysis was also used to identify the way MSMEs in these two countries define sustainable marketing activities aimed at employees.

Key findings. The study revealed that differences between the two countries in relation to the assessment of sustainable marketing activities aimed at employees are statistically significant. Asian respondents assess them higher then Polish ones. To the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first in-depth study regarding the assessment of sustainable marketing activities aimed at employees. The study is a comparative analysis of the phenomenon between markets with different cultures – Poland (as an example of the European market) and Sri Lanka (as an example of the Asian market), which has not been previously researched.