Social Marketing and Sustainability: A Bibliometric Analysis

Social marketing has emerged as a potential pathway to encourage more sustainable consumption patterns, yet given the slow progress in addressing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, identifying gaps in research and policy is a pressing need. The current study utilised a bibliometric analysis approach to synthesise the existing research and identify potentially under-researched topics. Relevant publications (n = 676) were extracted from Scopus and imported to the VOSviewer software to run a co-occurrence mapping analysis. Six clusters emerged from the analysis which indicate that existing efforts have focused solely on the observable outer dimensions of sustainability, including upstream factors, such as policies, and downstream factors such as our outer conduct and behaviour, hence, neglecting the unobservable downstream factors involving the inner dimensions and transformations surrounding sustainability, including our thoughts and emotions, and the ability to transcend them. These findings pave the way for further research and policy development.