Dear Colleagues,

Marketing strategies may impact the sustainability of the agro-food industry in many ways. Advertising for non-nutritious foods may increase rates of childhood obesity and decrease social sustainability. An excess of food packaging aimed at influencing the perceived value increases urban waste, with negative effects on environmental sustainability. Brand positioning of private labels may affect vertical coordination along the food supply chain by increasing power asymmetries, with negative effects on economic and social sustainability. Besides these few examples, there are many other ways in which marketing strategies may impact the various dimensions of sustainability.

Over the past few years, a rich literature has flourished concerning the study of marketing policies used to promote more sustainable food products, such as fair trade, organic products, sustainable fishing, recyclable packaging and so on. Much attention has also been paid to collective marketing, marketing of local products, and corporate vs. cooperative firms’ marketing attitudes. Less attention instead has been paid to other topics, such as, for example, the study of the interconnections between technological innovation, competitive structure of the agri-food system, and firms’ strategic adaptation. In general, when approaching the linkages between marketing strategies and sustainability the extant literature focuses on single actions and their consequences on single sustainability dimensions, with ‘positive’ relationships being more investigated than the ‘negative’ ones. Moreover, while consumer behavior has been widely investigated, there is a lack of analysis with regard to firms’ competitive behavior, especially when considering business-to-business relationships.

This Special Issue welcomes papers contributing to a better understanding of the relationship between marketing strategies and sustainability within the food supply chain, considering all the sustainability dimensions and all the actors (from firms selling to final consumers up to agricultural input industries) of the food chain. A primary goal of the issue is to show that food marketing policies may affect the sustainability of the agro-food industry not only through their effects on consumers’ behaviors, but also through their effects in terms of supply chain management and organizational structure.

We expect theoretical and empirical contributions as well as general reviews. Multi/interdisciplinary approaches will be particularly appreciated. Marketing science is within the wider research field of economics and management and makes large use of other disciplines such as industrial organization, statistics and social psychology. Moreover, the four dimensions of sustainability (environmental, social, economic, and political) require different research fields (ranging from all kinds of social sciences to biology, engineering, ecology, chemistry, and so on) in order to be investigated. Therefore, the topics addressed in this Special Issue should take great advantage of multi/interdisciplinarity.

Covered topics include (but are not limited to):

• Sustainable Food Marketing strategies
• Vertical coordination and sustainability in the agro-food system
• Sustainable food supply chain management
• Digitalization of food marketing and food systems sustainability
• Innovation, power shifts in vertical contractual relationships and sustainability of the food supply chain
• Sustainable international marketing
• Sustainable global food value chains
• Food marketing adaptation to information technology and sustainability
• Resilient agro-food systems: food marketing response to global crisis (see the cases of climate change and Covid19)
• Food marketing and food sovereignty: moving forward to alternative sustainable food supply chains

Dr. Dr. Valeria Sodano
Dr. Maria Teresa Gorgitano
Guest Editors

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• Sustainability
• Food
• Food marketing
• Vertical coordination
• Supply chain management
• Global value chain
• International marketing
• Brand positioning
• Power relationships
• Technological innovation
• Digitalization
• Agro-food sector
• Organic agriculture
• Fair trade
• Food sovereignty
• Industrial organization
• Resilient agro-food systems