On September 24, 2026, we welcomed Professor Christian Fuentes and Emmelina Eriksson from Lund University to the Post-Growth Business seminar series. Their seminar explored a provocative question for both marketing and post-growth research: can marketing, a business practice conventionally designed to stimulate demand and sell more, instead help people consume less? Their presentation, Enabling Less?
The Conditional and Uneven Performativity of Sufficiency-Promoting Marketing, examined what they call sufficiency-promoting marketing, meaning marketing practices, devices and strategies that seek to encourage and enable consumption that is ‘enough, but not more than enough’. Rather than assuming that consumers can simply be persuaded to buy less, their research asks how marketing might reshape the conditions under which consumption actually takes place. This builds on their recent work on sufficiency-oriented consumption, which conceptualises sufficiency as establishing and maintaining levels of ‘enough’ by reducing the resource intensity of everyday practices. Importantly, consumption reduction is understood here as a social accomplishment rather than simply an individual consumer choice. Companies, policies, infrastructures and social norms can all make consuming less easier, or more difficult.
What can a pair of jeans tell us about sufficiency?
The empirical case presented in the seminar was Nudie Jeans, a Swedish clothing company that has developed a range of practices around durability, repair, reuse and second-hand consumption. Fuentes and Eriksson examined how the company intervenes in three different stages of consumption: acquisition, use and disposal.
For acquisition, Nudie Jeans attempts to shift attention away from novelty and rapidly changing fashion towards durability, timeless designs and second-hand purchasing. Its reuse programme provides infrastructure for second-hand consumption, while encouraging consumers to evaluate clothing by longevity rather than fashion trends.
For use, the company encourages consumers to keep their jeans for longer through repair services and advice on care and washing. Particularly interesting is the way in which wear and ageing are reframed from processes of devaluation into processes of value creation. Jeans become more individual through use: fading, wear and repair become part of their history and identity rather than signals that they should be replaced. There is an intriguing resonance here with Japanese ideas such as wabi-sabi, where ageing and imperfection can contribute to beauty and value, and kintsugi, where repair becomes part of an object’s history rather than something to conceal. From a sufficiency perspective, this represents an important reversal of conventional consumer logic: newness does not necessarily create value, and ageing does not necessarily destroy it.
Finally, Nudie Jeans seeks to change disposal practices through repair, take-back schemes, resale and recycling. Worn or damaged jeans are reframed as resources that can continue circulating rather than as waste. Together, these interventions attempt to reorganise the meanings, materials and competences surrounding clothing consumption so that keeping, repairing and recirculating products become practical and desirable alternatives to replacement.
But does sufficiency-promoting marketing actually produce sufficiency?
This is where the study becomes particularly interesting. Fuentes and Eriksson find that the effects of these interventions are conditional and uneven. Consumers do sometimes buy durable jeans, repair them, purchase second-hand products and keep garments in circulation. Yet the same practices can produce quite different outcomes. Durability can generate emotional attachment and even collecting. Second-hand markets can make additional purchases easier to justify. Personalisation and distinctive ageing can increase the desirability of products. Consumers may carefully maintain and repair particular garments without reducing their overall clothing consumption. In other words, an intervention designed to enable less consumption can become entangled with novelty, collectability, accumulation and attachment. Sufficiency therefore cannot be inferred simply from the existence of repair services, durable products or second-hand markets. As the presentation concluded, marketing does not directly produce reduced consumption. Rather, it configures conditions that may enable it, depending on how meanings, competences, infrastructures and practices come together.
The post-growth business question
For post-growth business research, this raises an even deeper question. What happens to the firm itself if sufficiency-promoting marketing succeeds? A company can encourage customers to repair products, keep them longer and buy second-hand rather than new. Yet if the organisation remains dependent on continuously increasing revenues and sales volumes, a fundamental tension remains. Selling fewer products to each customer can coexist with acquiring more customers, entering new markets, introducing new product categories or stimulating additional consumption elsewhere.
The question therefore moves beyond whether marketing can enable consumers to consume less. It becomes: can firms themselves become organised so that they can prosper when their customers genuinely buy less?
This brings sufficiency-promoting marketing directly into conversation with post-growth business research. Sufficiency may require changes not just in products, marketing and consumer practices, but also in organisational purpose, financial arrangements, ownership and governance, and ultimately in firms’ dependence on continuous growth. The seminar therefore leaves us with a productive paradox: marketing may be able to help create the conditions for consuming less, but enabling less consumption at scale may ultimately require businesses that are themselves able to live with less growth.
