Ethical Influence of Small Start-ups on Sustainable Practices in the Healthcare Industry

In June 2023, the private healthcare company Bupa launched their eco-Disruptive challenge aimed
to encourage, “Bupa employees, entrepreneurs and start-ups come together to tackle sustainability
challenges within our business and the health sector.” Eco-Disruptive is Bupa’s global talent and
innovation programme, developed to improve sustainability within healthcare. Its goals are Mission
Zero, Mission Accelerate, Mission Regenerate (Bupa.co.uk).
Dragon, Deborah Meaden commented about eco-Disruptive,
“Consumers have woken up to the power they have in their pockets in the past five or six years.
They are telling businesses, you need to change the way you do things. They want to make sure
businesses are reducing their planetary impact. And businesses will – and do – listen to the
consumer.”
She went on to observe that unsustainable and green-washing big businesses will be brought into
line by new breeds of small, start-up companies.
Using your knowledge of marketing ethics and marketing relationships and using contemporary
examples, explore how small start-ups in the healthcare industry, such as those competing for the
eco-Disruptive challenge, might be able to ethically influence larger and more established players
in the industry to become more sustainable.
In their response, students should make good use of the literature, adopting a critical approach to
consider issues such as:
 How the values of a brand and its ethical position or a brand might be affected by genuinely
sustainable business practices
 How might a start-up, whose core value is sustainability, manage their marketing
relationships to amplify their influence in the industry and beyond?
 How marketing relationships might be used to engender trust and amplify customer
awareness of and demand for more sustainable business practices?
The required format of this work is an essay, including an introduction, main body that contains
your narrative response, and a conclusion that draws together the threads to fully answer the
question