A sustainable supply chain management: an integrated marketing communications perspective

Sustainability has become an increasingly important issue in today’s business world. All firms operating in domestic and global business must be cognizant of all the myriad aspects of sustainability. All areas of Marketing, including Supply-Chain Management {SCM} have to operate in this new environment. This paper looks at sustainability and its importance in today's business world from the perspective of marketing and Integrated Marketing Communications {IMC}. More and more online marketing is helping businesses build and develop new, innovative and successful IMC programs, and special attention will be given to this function and how it works with other components. This paper will focus on the interaction between IMC and SCM in terms of sustainability. The paper first examines SCM macro aspects. Next several SCM micro examples are used to show how various SCM members tackle the challenge of sustainability from the perspective of IMC. These firms and organizations will be selected from different components of the supply-chain. For example, there will be a railroad {CSX}, a trucking company {YRC-The merged Yellow Freight and Roadway Express}, a distribution center {Giant Food}, a freight forwarder {UPS}, and a port {Port of Baltimore}. The paper will wind up with a relevant summary and conclusions section. The paper emphasizes the synergistic importance in developing excellent IMC programs to promote sustainability and for individual SCM members to promote their sustainability efforts.