Sustainability in Clothing Supply Chains: Implications for Marketing

• Main Author: SESHADRI, Sudhindra
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2012
• Subjects: Sustainability; business syndicates; ethical sourcing; plural governance; multiple stakeholders; marketing; Business Administration, Management, and Operations; Marketing
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/lkcsb_research/3211; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/lkcsb_research/article/4210/viewcontent/Macromarketing2012Proceedings.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Recommendations for sustainability strategies for business have predominantly taken an individual firm level perspective. Yet, sustainability efforts are by essence collaborative and span firm level boundaries. Multiple stakeholders espousing often divergent goals need to work together over long periods on sustainability collaborations. Well recognized externalities in the firm’s economic existence need to be addressed by multiple stakeholder skill sets and are fraught with high risks and uncertainties. These are conditions ripe for syndication, as financial and corporate syndicates have demonstrated.The rules of syndication cover the structure of membership, setting of goals and objectives, governance, incentives and sharing of rewards and costs between stakeholders. Stakeholders can harmonize their goals, rent other stakeholder skill sets and achieve scale economies, while they hedge their risks by diversifying across the uncertainties that they individually confront. Syndication has implications for value oriented marketing strategy, some of which are for product and process innovation, contracts and relationships, positioning and marketing communications, and customer equity models. The clothing supply chain, specifically knitting and hosiery from India, provides an illustrative case study. Business networks and configurations in clothing need to evolve a syndicate model to further accommodate multiple stakeholders, self-regulation and mutual self-interest.