Sustainability Influencers: Between Marketers and Educators

Abstract

Sustainability has recently become mainstream research and managerial interest topic, as consumers worry about climate change and the effects of consumption. Social media plays an important educational role: #zerowaste has more than 4 million posts on Instagram, with consumers showing their efforts to produce less trash and conserve. We propose that marketers have an educational role: to share information about products through content marketing. We use examples from main venues of social media, such as YouTube and Instagram, and adapt the conceptual framework from Nistor et al. (2018) to capture omnidirectional content sharing of influencers as both educators and marketers.