SUSTAINABILITY MARKETING IN ROMANIA’S RETAIL SECTOR

Sustainable development is the most pressing concern of contemporary organizations, as it requires profound changes in their business strategies and practices. The need to ensure business sustainability triggered a broadening of the concept of marketing, its task being to meet the needs of current and future generations of consumers by creating and offering products and services in a sustainable way. We used content analysis of retailers' web sites, completed with information from Retailer Scorecard 2016 Report, to assess the extent to which representative retailers implement sustainable marketing practices in Romania. The major contributions of this study are: the creation of a conceptual model for evaluating the results of sustainable marketing in an organization, starting from the dimensions of sustainable development; a ranking of major retailers in Romania based on the performance of their sustainable marketing activities; the identification of key strategic directions of sustainable marketing, which guide marketing activities of major retailers in Romania, allowing the analysis of strategic groups of retailers.