Leveraging Artificial Intelligence to Drive Sustainable Marketing Practices: Can AI Make Marketing Green?

Sustainability is no longer just an aesthetic but a business requirement, especially in an age when industry continuously monitors the environment for issues such as climate change, water scarcity and waste disposal. At the same time, AI has also become an insurgency and is transforming business processes, such as marketing. The purpose of this paper is to connect AI with sustainable marketing where AI can be applied to support environmentally sustainable practices at the expense of maximising economic returns.

Sustainable marketing focuses on the people, planet and profit triple bottom line. AI accentuates this by giving you data-driven decisions, automated time-consuming operations and hyper-personalised campaigns. It’s used for waste reduction predictions, and sentiment analysis by artificial intelligence to detect greenwashing and eco-friendly digital marketing. Examples like Unilever’s Green Product campaigns based on AI give tangible proof of the impact of AI usage in green marketing.

Yet implementation costs, technical ignorance and ethical issues (algorithmic bias, data privacy) keep widespread adoption at bay. Our study answers these questions by exploring the perceptions of marketers, successful AI applications, and the opportunities to build AI into more sustainable marketing. For this we applied a qualitative research approach that involved semi-structured interviews, focus groups and document analyses.

Findings suggest AI has the power to promote sustainability through the optimization of supply chains, operational efficiency and ethical consumption. Upskilling experts, inter-stakeholder cooperation, and transparency for trust and credibility are recommendations. This paper bridges the literature and practice divide to bring to academia, industry and society concrete findings for making AI work for green marketing strategies, and setting the stage for new and more sustainable approaches.