Re-evaluating Obsolescence and Planning for It

Abstract

This chapter explores how the quest to develop technologies and products that are more durable depends on changing how people think both about marketing and within marketing, creating a new sustainable marketing paradigm. It also explores how the search to develop more sustainable markets, in which fewer unnecessarily short-lived products are made, requires an evolution in people thought processes as well as in new product development processes. The relationship between the field of marketing and the sustainability and resource consumption agendas has evolved through a number of stages. During the development of the marketing discipline throughout the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the physical environment was viewed as largely irrelevant to the majority of people working within marketing. The economic and political fall-out from the 2008/2009 credit crunch has revealed that an economy based on unsustainable levels of debt and consumption is unstable from an economic, as well as a socio-environmental, perspective.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 43 citations exist upstream.