The focus of entities nowadays is not only on financial results but also on ecological and social impacts of their businesses. This focus should be applied to all marketing principles. Unlike research on contributions, which emphasizes its general importance for entities’ operation in the market, there is little work exploring sustainability issues connected with brands and branding. In this paper, we argue that the sustainability aspect should be reasonably incorporated into both the visible elements and invisible elements of brands, at the level of brand development as well as implementation. The latter was tested on the brand I feel Slovenia, where sustainability is incorporated as the main branding idea. Our analysis shows that sustainability issues were systematically incorporated into both the visible and invisible parts of the brand. Consequently, all identity elements of the I feel Slovenia brand clearly indicate brands’ focus on nature and sustainable concepts.

In the past, it was commonly believed that marketing and sustainability were opposite terms, since marketing was usually perceived as the promotion of more consumption while sustainability promoted less consumption (Jones et al., 2008). Furthermore, marketing was seen as incompatible with sustainability, since higher consumer satisfaction was usually associated with higher abuse of the environment (Peattie, 1995; Van Dam and Apeldoorn, 1996; and Leonidou, and Leonidou, 2011). Nevertheless, these areas of research have become closely connected due to a high concern for the environment. Therefore, the question of how to incorporate sustainability (Charter and Clark, 2007; Nidumolu et al., 2009; De Medeiros et al., 2014; and Walz and Koehler, 2014) into marketing strategies has become an important question in the marketing field (Jones et al., 2008; and Leonidou, and Leonidou, 2011).

Sustainable marketing currently includes a broad range of marketing activities, including product modifications, changes in the production process, changes in packaging, and changes in marketing communication (Grundey and Zaharia, 2008). The concept of sustainable marketing has been applied to products and services (Peattie, 1992, Porter and Van der Linde, 1995; James, 1997; Maxwell and van der Vorst, 2003; Chen, 2010; and Gmelin and Seuring, 2014), companies (Collins et al., 2010), places (Gilmore et al., 2007; Woodland and Acott, 2007; and Collins et al., 2010) or even events (Li et al., 2013).

Brand Management Journal, Incorporating, Sustainability, Branding, Sustainability, Analysis, Sustainability , Brand Development, Branding Concept, Slovenia.