Developing sustainability discourse skills for business

Marketing has a vital role to play in enabling the success and economic viability of sustainable products, services, and experiences. As a result, “sustainability marketing” has emerged as an interdisciplinary area of knowledge, constructed by social and discursive practices. In this chapter, we apply genre pedagogy, which combines developing knowledge of the disciplinary field with developing language skills to successfully produce written and oral texts, to sustainability marketing as a way to understand these social and discursive practices. After a brief introduction to sustainability marketing and genre pedagogy, we use key aspects of genre to explore the context of sustainability marketing and features of sustainability marketing discourse, followed by a discussion of teaching and learning activities. The teaching notes provides activities for reading a sustainability marketing research article on the adoption of environment-friendly cars. These activities make visible the construction of sustainability marketing knowledge, the authors’ position and the structure of the article. Our aim is to provide specific approaches that can be used to develop skills to read and understand, as well as produce sustainability marketing texts. These skills are essential for university graduates, not only to demonstrate their sustainability knowledge, skills, and attitudes to future employers, but also so they can make innovative contributions to sustainable businesses, organisations, and communities in their careers.