A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making Framework for Evaluating the Carbon Footprint and Sustainability Performance of Digital Marketing Channels

Abstract

Digital marketing has expanded rapidly, and with it the use of data-intensive advertising systems whose energy use and carbon emissions are rarely questioned. Sustainability now receives close attention in business and engineering, yet the environmental side of digital marketing channels has been studied very little. This study addresses that gap with a multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) framework that evaluates digital marketing channels on both performance and sustainability. Objective weights from the CRITIC and MEREC methods are combined with WASPAS to rank five channels under several criteria. Besides the usual performance indicators (click-through rate, engagement, conversion, cost per click and return on investment), the model adds carbon footprint and energy consumption as proxy sustainability criteria. The decision matrix draws on benchmark values and computational energy coefficients reported in the literature, which gives a comparable dataset without any primary data collection. The framework rests on the Natural-Resource-Based View (NRBV) of the firm, which treats environmentally efficient capabilities as a source of competitive advantage. Adding the sustainability criteria changes the ranking and brings out the trade-off between marketing performance and environmental cost. The framework offers managers an objective tool for judging channels with sustainability in mind, and it links digital marketing analytics to environmental sustainability through an engineering-oriented model. Email Marketing obtained the highest overall score (1.000) and Display Advertising the lowest (0.490). The CRITIC and MEREC weightings produced the same ranking, confirmed by a Spearman rank correlation of rs = 1.000 (P<0.001), which points to a stable framework.

Keywords

• Multi-criteria decision-making
• Digital marketing
• Sustainability
• Carbon footprint
• CRITIC
• MEREC

Ethical Statement

Ethics committee approval was not required for this study because there was no study on animals or humans.

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