by Hector R. Lozada and Alma T. Mintu-Wimsatt

About the authors: Hector R. Lozada is an assistant professor of marketing at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. Alma T. Mintu-Wimsatt is an associate professor of marketing at Texas A&M University in Commerce, Texas.

In the 1970s, leading marketing thinkers like Philip Kotler and Gerald Zaltman mandated that “social marketing” become an important concept in the discipline. Social marketing was defined as “the application of marketing concepts and techniques to the marketing of various socially beneficial ideas and causes instead of products and services in the commercial sense.” This definition implicitly includes ideas on the preservation, conservation, and protection of the physical environment as a component of social marketing.

Building on the tenets of social marketing, Karl E. Henion and...