The Sustainability - Marketing Divide: How Organizational Silos Limit Green Marketing Capability in Pakistan’s Textile Export Industry: A Qualitative Study Using the Gioia Methodology and Thematic Analysis

Abstract

Over the last ten years, Pakistan's textile and apparel industry has made significant investments in compliance to environmental regulations, waste management, energy efficiency and international sustainability standards such as OEKO-TEX, Global Organic Textile Standard (GOTS), Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP), ISO 14001, and the Higg Index. Still, Pakistani suppliers are touted as being environmentally friendly but commercially invisible when it comes to sustainability by buyers, brand managers and industry watchers. This paper investigates why. The study uses a qualitative approach with an interview survey, analysed using the Gioia methodology and thematic analysis to understand how the organizational separation between the sustainability/compliance function and the export marketing function prevents Pakistani textile exporters from creating market value for their products through the environment. To achieve this, a total of 22 informants were selected from the different departments such as sustainability, compliance, merchandising, export marketing and senior management in 10 textile and apparel export-oriented companies of Faisalabad, Lahore and Karachi. Ten themes were identified, all of which were interrelated and fell into four broad domains: structural disconnection, breakdown of information-flow, weak communication to market, and organizational barriers and enabling conditions. Interpretation of the findings, based on the Natural Resource Based View (Hart, 1995) and Signaling Theory (Connelly, Certo, Ireland, & Reutzel, 2011; Spence, 1973) indicates that there is four stages of differences between doing sustainability, documenting sustainability, communicating sustainability, and strategically marketing sustainability. Only the last stage is a verifiable, buyer-relevant signal that is costly, and resolves information asymmetry with export buyers; the first three stages, even if they are executed well operationally, are commercially inert. A conceptual (conceptualized) model is created illustrating how the implementation of cross-functional integration mechanisms can lead to the creation of credible buyer-facing value propositions from environmental performance in silos. The paper makes a contribution to sustainable marketing theory by adding a layer of communicative-capability to the NRB and by identifying organizational silos as a structural antecedent of weak signaling, and provides practical suggestions and recommendations for the textile exporters, industry associations and the policymakers of Pakistan.

green marketing capability; organizational silos; sustainability communication; Natural Resource-Based View; signaling theory; Gioia methodology; Pakistan textile export industry; B2B sustainability marketing