Beyond the 7Ps: young consumers' perspectives on sustainable retail strategy

Purpose Despite sustainability's recognized importance in retail strategy, research has predominantly adopted organizational perspectives, giving limited attention to how young consumers conceptualize sustainable retail. This study examines young consumers' perspectives on sustainable retail strategy. Design/methodology/approach We integrate Stakeholder Theory, futures studies and grounded theory: Stakeholder Theory warrants centering participant perspectives, futures studies structures examination across current, probable and preferred futures and grounded theory inductively derives strategic dimensions from 343 narratives by US university students. Findings Participants describe sustainable retail as a coordination problem across stakeholders and system elements rather than as isolated practices or an individual decision problem. Despite favorable attitudes, price, availability and operational constraints limit consistent behavior. The 8Ps framework, the organizing form that emerged from the narratives during selective coding, locates these interdependent elements; policy emerges as a young consumer-derived dimension associated with coordinated change. Research limitations/implications Findings are interpretive and drawn from a young, US, university-educated sample. The coordination interpretation requires confirmatory follow-up through interview-based and multi-stakeholder designs, and the eighth dimension (policy) needs experimental work to identify which specific instruments young consumers endorse. Originality/value The contribution is the reframing of sustainable retail strategy as a coordination problem articulated from the young consumer standpoint, which repositions the marketing mix from a firm-side toolkit into a young consumer-derived diagnostic of cross-element and cross-stakeholder alignment, with Policy as a strategic dimension internal to retail strategy. The 8Ps framework is the organizing device rather than the contribution; the analytical move relocates the attitude-behavior gap from individual motivation to system-level alignment. This interpretation is exploratory, consistent with structural-barrier and perceived-behavioral-control accounts.