Exploring Marketing’s Contribution to the Sustainable Development Goals in Nigerian Firms: A Critical Theoretical Investigation

This study critically investigates marketing's contribution to the attainment of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the context of Nigerian firms, developing an original critical theoretical framework that examines the enabling, constraining, and paradoxical dimensions of marketing practice in sustainable development contexts. The relationship between commercial marketing and sustainable development is theoretically contested, with mainstream marketing literature increasingly positioning the discipline as a vehicle for SDG achievement through sustainable consumption, inclusive market development, and stakeholder value creation. Critical marketing scholars, however, argue that marketing's commercial imperative is structurally incompatible with sustainability objectives in resource-constrained, inequality-marked contexts like Nigeria. This study adopts a critical realist philosophical orientation and engages with critical marketing theory, the SDG implementation literature, and the political economy of development to construct a dialectical framework examining the conditions under which Nigerian firm marketing practices advance, constrain, or contradict SDG objectives across healthcare, agriculture, education, and energy sectors. A critical case study design examining 16 Nigerian firms across these sectors employs 80 interviews with marketing managers, sustainability officers, community stakeholders, and regulatory officials, supplemented by corporate sustainability report analysis and community impact data. Critical discourse analysis and constructivist grounded theory are employed. The study contributes a foundational critical theoretical perspective on marketing and sustainable development in sub-Saharan Africa. Keywords: sustainable development goals, critical marketing, sustainability, Nigerian firms, development