1. Introduction
The development of environmental awareness has become a worldwide phenomenon [
1,
2]. As a result, businesses have begun responding to environmental challenges using green marketing strategies, which are part of sustainable development strategies. Since the 1980s, ecological issues such as global warming, greenhouse effects, pollution, and climate change have been directly linked to industrial production [
3]. Currently, almost all companies and organizations have their own green development visions. They are visible in the published sustainability reports [
4,
5]. It is thus natural that businesses in almost every industry consider aspects of “environmental sustainability” when designing their products and services. One of its elements is sustainable marketing.
Sustainable marketing involves the development and promotion of products and services that meet customers’ needs in terms of quality, efficiency, price, and convenience without having a detrimental effect on the environment, society, or economy. It involves high technologies that communicate the offer and promote sustainable lifestyles and operations in companies [
6].
Technology in the modern age is one of the enablers helping to create value for the customer [
7]. Data are one of the most essential factors in improving the marketing environment and technologies have created different ways of producing data [
8]. Using these data can positively impact the growth of business activities and help customers achieve their desires and obtain the best products and services. Today, a variety of social networks and mobile applications act as “social sensors” by expressing people’s emotions and interacting with them together [
9]. The data produced on people’s opinions and desires are a low-cost resource for designing marketing activities. All of these aspects, along with the need for real-time analysis, relate to big data management in marketing.
The IoT is one of the most important big data sources, so it is a potentially good solution for achieving marketing goals. This technology was first introduced in 1999 by Kevin Ashton. He described a world where everything had a digital identity and was managed by computers [
10]. The advent of the IoT has changed many concepts, one of which is “smart marketing”. The most critical changes to smart marketing have occurred in the form of Internet-enabled smart devices, which can send and receive vast amounts of data from key sources that affect the business environment [
11]. If something integrates people, processes, data, and other objects in any configuration, it can be considered part of the Internet of Everything (IoE). As it is understood, this technology connects an extensive range of technologies in order to create more and better marketing communication.
However, the field of IT solutions in sustainable or green marketing has scarcely been investigated in the literature. The use of digital solutions in marketing, which is also called “smart marketing”, was examined by Ziółkowska with regard to small and medium enterprises (SMEs) [
12]. She indicated that the IoT is one of the most promising marketing tools and defined current marketing as “Marketing 4.0”. Similarly, Saura et al. examined data analysis from the point of view of social media (but mostly from the points of view of ethics and law) [
13]. In turn, Bhavana and Thiruchanuru presented green marketing from the perspective of the customer’s decision-making processes [
14]. However, they did not write about digital solutions. Additionally, Schmitt proved that positive attitudes towards sustainability do not translate into real consumer actions [
15].
A few studies have addressed fields of research similar to this study. Weng proved with survey results analysis that there is a “partial mediating effect of marketing intelligence capability in the link between IoT capability and business strategy performance” [
16]. Saura et al. described techniques of AI-based CRMs in digital marketing, but only in B2B relations [
17]. The most important sources for confirming the research gaps in digital marketing with regard to sustainability are the papers by Diez-Martin et al. [
18] and Saura et al. [
19]. They both relate to digital marketing and sustainable strategies. There are also many studies about the IoT. The presented literature addresses neither FMCG goods nor the IoT and its developed form, the IoE, in marketing in FMCG sectors or, specifically, the dairy industry.
This paper tries to partially fill the research gap concerning the use of IT technologies in green—or, broader, sustainable—marketing in the dairy industry. Generalizations about the whole of the FMCG part of the market are not possible because there is no ideal solution for all the sectors due to their specificities. Therefore, this paper only focuses on the chosen sector.
This study investigates the significance (importance) of factors affecting green marketing based on the IoE. The conceptual framework of the IoE in green marketing is presented as well. The originality of this paper lies in its topic (filling the research gap) and the research framework. This framework combines two methods, namely, a case study and expert interviews. The importance of some of the factors involved in building green marketing with the IoE approach is difficult to assess based on quantitative data, e.g., consumer surveys. Therefore, it was assumed that the experts would know the industry the best and be in the best position to assess the factors.
To achieve the research goal, the paper is structured as follows.
Section 2 presents a literature review in terms of sustainable marketing, green marketing, and the Internet of Everything. The next section describes the research approach, highlighting the characteristics of the case study, the expert interviews, and the data analysis. In
Section 4, the ecosystem of green marketing, based on the IoE, technologies, opportunities, and challenges, is described. This part contains the research findings finalized in the form of a conceptual model.
Section 5 discusses the results. Lastly, the conclusions are presented in
Section 6.
3. Sustainable Marketing Based on IoE
Nowadays, data have become ubiquitous: they are everywhere. Gathering data from many dispersed sources and complex analysis allow the design of products to create customer value.
Therefore, the importance of IoE in sustainable (including green) marketing has led to providing a framework for assessing the role of IoT and then IoE in sustainable marketing. The aspects of sustainable marketing presented in the framework of
Figure 2 are defined as follows [
44]:
Green marketing (environmental layer of sustainable marketing): developing and promoting environmental sustainability in marketing and company strategy, as well as tactical and operational layers of management (e.g., business processes).
Social marketing (social layer of sustainable marketing): using marketing tools, communication channels, etc., to encourage sustainable behavior, e.g., green lifestyle, no-waste lifestyle, or to build loyal customer groups identifying with a sustainable development idea, sustainable lifestyle, or sustainable consumerism ethos.
Critical marketing (economic layer of sustainable marketing): achieving business goals while managing resources efficiently, e.g., closed-loop supply chain, circular economy idea, green (but profitable) innovations, and adjusting the marketing strategy and toolset to this approach.
According to the proposed framework, the most key actors of green marketing are the business sector entities, including social marketing of the citizens, 3rd sector organizations, and critical marketing of markets, systems, institutions, and government. The importance of IoT and IoE tools leads to the development of sustainable marketing (e.g., any consumer application, any business application, any tagging technology, and anything with connectivity). They include many elements, both objects and technologies: smartphones, RFID, NTC, barcodes, QR codes, tablets, etc. Accordingly, the development of sustainable marketing [
45] leads to the following results:
Community building means developing new communities focused on users of particular devices, allowing for publishing content on social media. It facilitates targeting the marketing content for those groups.
The rise of conversational commerce keeps in touch with potential customers by using chatbots, intelligent assistants, and smart speakers. They allow shopping online, checking order status, and locating stores, restaurants, events, etc.
Data availability: IoE devices generate a large amount of real-time data from many sources. Data availability will let marketers test out new ideas and tools for big data analysis.
Predictive analysis: Tracking data from many data points requires ordering them, verification, analysis, and then prediction. Predictive analytics measures and analyzes users’ present and past purchase patterns, attitudes, behaviors, and location details and suggests their future choices. This will transform the company’s marketing into the proactive mode from the reactive mode.
Personalization: Marketers use communication such as targeted email campaigns, videos, and product and push notifications to deliver a personalized marketing experience for all users of the application—former and potential customers. CRMs (Customer Relationship Management) can be practical tools to obtain the correct and complete data.
Improved engagement: All the above elements provide an essential finding: IoE allows marketers to show highly relevant content to their audience. People are flooded by the information from online and offline channels throughout the day. Then, naturally, most of the ads are ignored. IoE devices may help marketers understand their audience pinpoint; marketers can reach them successfully with highly targeted content.
This literature review served as a basis for preparing the list of the most critical factors (criteria) in sustainable marketing. Due to the inconsistency of approaches of different researchers, the authors of this paper unified the list of criteria and sub-criteria, using the broadest set of them identified in the literature. When the same sub-criterion was assigned to different criteria, it was finally assigned to the criterion based on the most common approach in the literature. The following part of the paper examines the most important criteria and sub-criteria for influencing sustainable marketing using the IoT. Based on this, three main criteria and 11 main sub-criteria of identification have been reviewed for effectiveness (see
Table 1).
5. Results
Table 5 presents the factors influencing the use of IoE on dairy marketing using expert opinions. In analyzing the Likert scale questionnaire results, determining the mean for the data is not very effective. In such a case, the analysis of the results can be performed based on the “frequency of responses” and determining the “most common response” (see
Appendix A,
Table A1).
Based on expert opinions on the impact of criteria and sub-criteria on sustainable marketing based on IoE, it was found that the market factor (performance) with a weight of 0.3985 has the most critical impact on sustainable marketing. The second most important was the activity, and the third was facilitation.
The results in
Table 5 show that social networking tools have the most significant impact on marketing activities. As can be seen in this table, the activity and predictive capabilities of social media as one of the most effective tools of IoE in today’s world have the highest impact on sustainable marketing activities. They can play a decisive role in the sustainability of the dairy industry’s marketing ecosystem, which seems obvious given the high penetration rate of these technologies. Intelligence in customer relationship management systems also prioritizes sustainable optimal performance in IoE-based marketing [
36]. They are also powerful and valuable facilitators. Additionally, smart home appliances such as smart TVs, smart refrigerators, smart stoves, and sensors in smart homes have the highest impact factor on powerful, sustainable marketing performance.
Additionally, as presented in
Figure 3, there is a high impact of IoE technology on significant marketing activities. As can be seen, the average rate is above 75%. The values were obtained using data from interviews with experts. This value shows the high impact of IoE technology on the main parts of marketing and its sustainable development.
6. Discussion
The topic of this article is significant from a few points of view presenting the current economic situation, sudden changes, as well as long-term trends:
The development of the Internet of Things;
The development of the overall digitization of the global economy;
The development of the dairy industry;
Effects of sudden changes such as the COVID-19 pandemic;
The development and growing impact of sustainable development, including sustainable marketing (and within it green marketing as well), in the life of residents and operations of companies;
The development of the glocalization (globalization + localization) of production, customer demands, etc.
The dairy industry is a specific part of the FMCG industry because of (usually) the short expiration date of products, cold chain requirements, different consumers’ habits, further access to milk, and many others [
60,
61,
72]. Therefore, supply chain management in this industry requires reliable tools for managing the flows of goods [
61]. IoT can deliver those, but its development and a growing number of integrated objects lead to the emergence of the IoE [
69,
71]. Marketing is one of the possible areas where IoE can be used, and nowadays, the focus is on communicating the robust targeting on sustainability [
6] and green lifestyle [
82]. Within sustainable marketing, being green is crucial. Therefore, using IoT and IoE in sustainable marketing is justified, as confirmed by [
19].
However, no study strictly addressed this issue, which was also mentioned in the Introduction section of this paper. Looking at the scientific databases, with keywords of “sustainable marketing” or “green marketing” and “food” or “dairy” and “Internet of Things”, proved that even its usefulness is not addressed by the researchers. The most similar to the current issue were two studies about blockchain technology in agri-food supply chains [
83] and sustainable technologies in agri-food 4.0 [
84], and some more, but only in the area of smart packaging, specifically in the dairy industry [
58,
85,
86]. Therefore, it is worth discussing how to improve supply chain management methods and concepts by using IoT and IoE solutions. Since they will improve the way of using resources in the dairy industry, especially when the demand is very vulnerable, demand and supply shocks are caused by sudden events such as pandemics and products of the sector expire in the short term [
87] (see also
Table 6).
The experts perceived performance as the essential factor in developing IoE-based sustainable marketing. Companies need to invest vast amounts of money in digitization [
93], and their performance provides both the funds for the investments and chances for its maintenance and further development. The most critical areas of impact within this factor were those directly related to the income of dairy companies—smart equipment at home (e.g., fridges) and smart CRM software, as mentioned in the papers of [
17,
36,
52]. It will be developed into more big data-based solutions such as supply chain control towers [
52,
94]. Income translates into the profit and the funds for further investment, brand market values, and others [
95].
The experts’ second most important factor, predictive social media, acts as the leading facilitator of marketing activities within the activity factor. Social media are the leading market force right now [
25,
66,
92,
96], especially in younger groups of potential customers, with growing purchasing power and influence in the older cohorts, as confirmed by [
97,
98]. Furthermore, predictive media also affect changes in lifestyles. For example, people are more aware of healthy diets and the value of dairy products in building a healthy and long life [
60,
99].
Facilitation was an exciting factor taken into consideration, not having any dominating area of impact. Therefore, the finding can be that all the identified areas in experts’ opinions were equally important. If so, then they facilitate using IoE in sustainable marketing in the dairy industry.
7. Conclusions
In today’s world, with the development of technology, the ways of producing big data are increasing. Objects and people create large datasets by connecting to the Internet. On the other hand, IoE technology can play an important role in sustainability and sustainable development. Therefore, understanding the dimensions of this technology, its relationship with sustainable development, and how to use it to develop sustainable marketing can play a valuable role in improving processes and facilitating marketing activities. It can also be a step towards environmental sustainability. Hence, in this study, besides the connection and valuable role of IoE technology with sustainable marketing, a framework is proposed to provide an effective map in understanding the relationship between these concepts.
This paper examines the dimensions, components, and impact indicators of IoE and the crucial role that technology plays in the marketing environment. In addition to determining the impact rate, these indicators are extracted based on the opinions of experienced experts. This research has been tested in a case study in the dairy industry as one of the most important industries in FMCG. A framework has been presented to show the relationship between influential factors and then validated based on experts’ opinions. Of course, many studies presented in the literature have examined the role and dimensions of using artificial intelligence technologies and their effects on digital marketing [
11,
17,
89,
100]. Still, so far, other papers have not emphasized the effects of IoE on marketing and have not provided a conceptual model for it.
With the development of technology, the human ability to understand and use the vast amount of data around it increases every day. IoE technology goes beyond IoT technology, connecting everything to the Internet. Therefore, understanding and using this concept in all dimensions can play an influential role in developing processes and activities. Using this technology and understanding the key dimensions and components and effectively using the data produced can create marketing power to create value. Testing this technology in the dairy industry’s marketing as a valuable part of daily life can increase the credibility of using IoE in sustainable development.
Environmental sustainability is one of the most important concepts that companies should consider. One of the most powerful tools for understanding the customer needs of organizations and satisfying the green demand is sustainable marketing, to which companies should pay particular attention. IoE tools allow organizations to collect and analyze large volumes of data, which can be used, monetized, and can improve overall system performance to deliver new types of services. This paper highlights the latest advanced research efforts in sustainable marketing and their relevance to digital technologies. Specifically, three research areas, including the architecture and framework of green and sustainable marketing, IoE architecture and communication protocols, and data management techniques, are examined in detail. In addition, the main research challenges for the successful deployment of IoE-based sustainable marketing are identified. This study concludes that the success of this smart and sustainable marketing system can be achieved if companies will address the key challenges, which include designing efficient data management programs, analytical and flexible big data technologies, and trusting IoE systems. Providing the right solutions can address these challenges. This study can be used as a guide to address some of the unresolved modern marketing challenges.
If so, this paper has theoretical (research) implications and practical ones. The research implications lie in creating a framework for IoE usage in the dairy industry or, more broadly, in FMCG industries. However, it was only a case study based on the opinions of a limited number of experts, so it should be verified in future research. For sure, this will be carried out since the pace of technological development is very fast. If talking about the managerial implications, the findings of this study can inform decision-makers (e.g., managers or marketing staff), especially from the discussed industry. Furthermore, knowledge about the factors that are relevant in building modern digital marketing can be taken into consideration. Moreover, sustainable development and customers’ requirements about green businesses, green products, and minimizing the environmental impact are determined.
The value of this paper lies in the uniqueness of the topic, not mentioned in the same form in any literature source. The authors hope that the findings of this study will start a new direction of scientific discussion about IoE in today’s business, especially in the times of online work and life in the COVID-19 pandemic era, besides the robotization and digitization of everything in socio-economic systems.