Sustainability-Based Marketing Assets and Sustainable Competitive Advantage: A Literature Review on Market Performance Evidence from Pakistan and Emerging Economies
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Abstract
The increasing strategic relevance of sustainability-related marketing assets such as green brand image, eco-labelling and sustainable product positioning is a focus of increasing scholarly interest, however there is limited and somewhat conflicting empirical support on if and how these assets may lead to sustainable competitive advantage and enhanced market performance especially in the context of emerging market economies. This review uses the Marketing-Asset → Competitive-Advantage → Market-Performance (MAC-MAP) chain as the overarching assessment framework and it is structured around the literature according to the following subdimensions: Type of asset (green brand image, eco-labelling, sustainable positioning), mediating mechanism (cost- vs. differentiation-based advantage), and performance metric (market share, customer loyalty, brand equity, financial return). Based on a pool of peer-reviewed articles from 2018 to 2026 under the complementary lenses of the Resource- Based View (RBV), Natural Resource-Based View (NRBV), stakeholder theory, and institutional theory, it is revealed that performance outcomes of sustainability-based marketing assets are positive yet context sensitive - moderate and relatively stable in developed (with meta-analytic correlations in the range of 0.15–0.30) but attenuated and highly divergent in emerging markets, e.g., Pakistan. The most important deficiency noted is the unsettled argument between the net-advantage hypothesis and the legitimacy-threshold hypothesis, a debate that has broad implications for the way managers ought to size up investments in sustainability marketing. The survey ends with the suggestion of a research agenda focused on longitudinal designs, objective performance measures, and multi-country comparative studies that consider institutional heterogeneity explicitly
Keywords
Sustainability Marketing, Green Brand Image, Eco-Labelling, Sustainable Competitive Advantage, Market Performance, Emerging Economies, Pakistan, MAC-MAP Framework
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