green marketing · elements were selected as per convenience and were asked to return the filled...
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National Conference on Marketing and Sustainable Development October 13-14, 2017
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Green Marketing
Pavan Kumar P S
Siddharth Institution of Engineering & Technology
Generally, many of the Consumers and manufacturers have directed their attention toward
environment friendly products that are presumed to be “green” or environment friendly like
low power consuming (energy-efficient) electrical appliances, organic foods, lead free paints,
recyclable paper, and phosphate free detergents. Indian marketers are also realizing the
importance of the green marketing concept. This is especially true of marketing. As society
becomes more concerned with the natural environment, businesses have begun to modify
their behavior in an attempt to address society's "new" concerns. Some businesses have been
quick to accept concepts like environmental management systems and waste minimization,
and have integrated environmental issues into all organizational activities. Green marketing
incorporates a broad range of activities, including product modification, changes to the
production process, packaging changes, as well as modifying advertising. Yet defining green
marketing is not a simple task. Indeed, the terminology used in this area has varied, it
includes: Green Marketing, Environmental Marketing and Ecological Marketing. While
green marketing came into prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it was first
discussed much earlier. The American Marketing Association (AMA) held the first workshop
on "Ecological Marketing" in 1975. The proceedings of this workshop resulted in one of the
first books on green marketing entitled "Ecological Marketing.
Keywords: Introduction, Objectives, Green Products& Marketing Practices, Methodology &
Measurement, Findings and Discussion, Consumer Perception & Action, Advantages &
Disadvantages challenges, Conclusion.
1. Introduction
Businesses need to constantly assess the latest and most attractive marketing trends.
Marketing trends can be found out by continually researching about the changes in consumer
behavior in the marketplace. By identifying the changes in the consumer behavior, the
businesses can modify their offering to the consumers. Consumers today are more concerned
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about environmental degradation and negative impact of their uses of product and services on
environment. The reason for this concern could be visible climatic changes, global warming
and increasing air and water pollution. Thus, using green marketing by the organizations not
only provides an opportunity to meet.
2. Research Objectives
1. To investigate the level of awareness of Indian consumers about green products and
practices.
2. To measure the green values of the customers.
3. To identify the brands, consumer associate with green marketing practices.
4. To investigate the preferences of Indian consumers about green products.
5. To identify the factors that influences the customer persuasion to buy green products.
6. To understand the issues and challenges of green marketing practices.
3. Green Products and Marketing Practices
Actually, there is no consensus on what exactly is green. There is no accepted definition of
green product. However, based on different definitions of green marketing, some common
characteristics of products generally accepted as green, including the products are:
1. Energy efficient (both in use and in production).
2. Water efficient (both in use and in production).
3. Low emitting (low on hazardous emissions).
4. Safe and/or healthy products.
5. Recyclable and/or with recycled content
6. Durable (long-lasting).
7. Biodegradable.
8. Renewable.
9. Reused products.
10. Third party certified to public or transport standard (e.g., organic, certified wood)
11. Locally produced
12. Pathanjali
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4. Methodology and Measurement
The unit of analysis in this study is the consumer level. Classification of consumers from
Green Gauge Study of Roper Organization (2001) was adapted in this study. 10 consumers
were asked to fill the questionnaire for pretesting and to identify the ambiguity in terms,
meanings and issues. Therefore, the questionnaire had a high level of content validity. The
respondents were asked to rate the statement on a 5-point scale ranging from strongly
disagree to strongly agree. Since the neutral point on the scale was 3, those means above 3
suggests overall agreement with the statement and the mean below 3 reflects disagreement.
106 valid responses for the questionnaire were received. After the pretest, the sample
elements were selected as per convenience and were asked to return the filled questionnaires
within 1 week.
5. Findings and Discussion
Respondents surveyed were aware about the green products and practices. However most of
the respondents were not aware about the initiatives taken for promoting green marketing
practices by central/state government, NGOs and business houses in India suggesting need
for better marketing communication from these entities and have to strongly communicate to
the customers about their green initiatives. Newspaper and Television were found to be the
most known sources of information regarding green products to the consumers.
6. Need for the Study
Green marketing has now evolved as one of the major area of interest for marketers a sit may
provide competitive advantages. However, it requires investment in terms of technology
enhancement, process modification, communicating benefits to customers etc. Many of the
companies in India have now started marketing themselves as green organizations due to
certain government regulations and shift in the preference of the consumers worldwide.
However, not much research with respect to green marketing has been done in India and there
is question about the awareness of green products among consumers. The attitude of Indian
consumers towards green products and the relationship between the attitude and behavior is
also questionable. As green marketing is different from the marketing in traditional way,
marketers need to know the factors that persuade the consumer to buy the green products.
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This study aims to resolve the research question that what factors influence the consumer
persuasion to buy the green product or not.
7. Consumer Perception About Green Products and Practices
Consumers strongly agreed that the environmental degradation has risen in the last decade.
All consumers have rated the seriousness on higher side for various factors that are
considered as environmental concern. Consumers’ agreement regarding environmental
degradation was high and may prefer green products over conventional products to protect
the environment Respondents have rated the seriousness of various environmental concerns
as high. The responses have marketing implications in terms of designing marketing
communication campaigns, as higher mean score representing higher concern regarding the
same amongst consumers and thus could be used while promoting green products.
Consumers were strongly agreeing for the importance of green marketing practices and have
rated “Manufacturing Eco-Friendly Product” as the most important green marketing practice
followed by “Educating customers to use products in environmental friendly manner”. This
suggests that consumers are concerned about the state of environment and expect the
organizations to employ green practices towards the protection of environment.
8. Reasons for Green Marketing
1. Opportunities available and competitive advantage.
2. Corporate social responsibility on the part of companies.
3. Government regulations.
4. Competition with other responsible companies.
5. Goodwill of the company
6. Environment conscious consumers.
7. For conserving scarce natural resources.
9. Advantages of Green Marketing
Companies that boast new products, services, processes, or procedures that shine a light on
their attention to environmental or social issues are in for some positive benefits. Consider
the following advantages to green marketing:
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1. You can reach new markets. Consumers who may not previously have been interested in
your products may show new interest now that they see the benefits of your recyclable or
renewable products.
2. You become more profitable. Thanks to being able to reach new markets, you are likely
to see a boost in your sales, as eco-savvy consumers make the switch from their usual
brand to one boasting more environmental awareness.
3. You can best your competition. Want to stand out among a sea of competitors? You no
longer have to market solely on your product's price or value; instead, you can focus on
its environmental and social benefits.
4. You save money (eventually). It might take a bit more investment to get environmentally-
friendly manufacturing processes in place or to change up your marketing tactics, but in
the long run, you'll be saving money through your eco-friendly practices. For example, it
may cost money to install solar panels initially, but the reduced energy consumption will
save you big bucks going forward.
5. You raise awareness of important issues. Coca-Cola has focused much of its green
marketing on the lack of clean drinking water in underdeveloped countries. This has
created partnerships between Coca-Cola and others focused on trying to provide clean
water sources to these communities.
6. You encourage both environmental and corporate social responsibility. Social
responsibility says that we all have a duty to act in a way that benefits society as a whole.
Green marketing can encourage individuals inside and outside of your organization to
think more about their impact.
7. You earn goodwill in the public eye. Don't underestimate the importance of your green
marketing initiatives where the public is concerned. Many people are becoming more
focused on buying from brands that are environmentally conscious. It can even build
brand loyalty.
10. Green Marketing Disadvantages
1. Change Leads to Cost: Changing your marketing tactics takes time and the development
of a new strategy, which typically translates into increased costs. While your sustainable
efforts and practices are designed to save money, when a company puts effort into
changing their brand to be more environmentally friendly, those changes can have
expensive upfront costs.
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2. Costly Green Certificates: To commercialize your products as “green”, depending on
your industry you might have to go through a long and pricey process to obtain the
environmental certifications. These certifications, which the governments, industry
associations, professional associations and consumer rights groups distribute, use certain
certifications to meet industry environmental standards. This is especially true for
companies operating in the fields of energy consumption and recycling waste
management. Respecting these standards can be difficult and that is one of the main green
marketing disadvantages.
3. Green Marketing: As green marketing brings so many advantages to a business, a lot of
big companies try to look “greener” and the majority of it is just green washing. This
means a company will make something not sustainable look green by putting all of the
attention on a little detail.
For example
Water companies are extremely harmful to the environment. Yet you will see many that say
“Our packaging is 100% recyclable”, while the entire production process is so polluting that
they are not a sustainable business. That’s why many customers have grown skeptical of
seeing the word “green” stamped on products or services. The word “green” has been vastly
overused and has practically lost all of its meaning. What’s more, some customers even see it
as simply an excuse for a company to charge more for products with no environmental
benefits.
11. Consumers Action
Consumers felt that green products are priced higher than conventional products (with mean
score of 3.83. They have revealed that they prefer the green products over conventional
products while purchasing (with mean score of 3.78). Consumers have also revealed that they
consider the ill effect of the manufacturing and consumption on natural environment and the
price of the green product affects their purchase behavior with mean score of 3.59 and 3.58
respectively. As consumers consider the ill effects of manufacturing and consumption on
natural environment it can be said that following green marketing practices not only lead to
social good but also make good business sense. When asked about the factors that affect the
purchase of green products, consumers rated “awareness about green product” followed by
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“availability of green product”, and “product price” at second and third position. This implies
that marketers have to extensively market and communicate the availability of green products
to the consumers. This implies that consumers are not skeptic about the green claims of the
organizations Consumers strongly agreed that the environmental degradation has risen in the
last decade.
All consumers have rated the seriousness on higher side for various factors that are
considered as environmental concern. Consumers’ agreement regarding environmental
degradation was high and may prefer green products over conventional products to protect
the environment. Marketers can come up with new green products and communicate the
benefits to the consumers. Respondents have rated the seriousness of various environmental
concerns as high. The responses have marketing implications in terms of designing marketing
communication campaigns, as higher mean score representing higher concern regarding the
same amongst consumers and thus could be used while promoting green products.
Consumers were strongly agreeing for the importance of green marketing practices and have
rated “Manufacturing Eco-Friendly Product” as the most important green marketing practice
followed by “Educating customers to use products in environmental friendly manner”. This
suggests that consumers are concerned about the state of environment and expect the
organizations to employ green practices towards the protection of environment.
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13. Ethical Issues in Marketing
Most academic publishing in the 1950s focused on issues such as fair trade, antitrust,
advertising and pricing. Marketing ethics examines systematically marketing and marketing
morality, related to 4P-issues such as unsafe products, deceptive pricing, deceptive
advertising or bribery, discrimination in distribution. According to some researchers, the
fairness on trade practices construct which are also termed as the micro issues of
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consumerism consider various exploitative business practices among which the mostly
discussed issues are misleading advertising, unfair pricing, deceptive packaging, caring about
consumers and environmental issues, product adulteration, black marketing, misbranding
practice etc. Some of these factors (misleading advertising, unfair pricing, deceptive
packaging, caring about consumers and environmental issues) are used as the core elements
for this research to figure out the possible influence on consumers’ ethical decisions 24.
Over the past few years it has been observed that producers are increasingly employing
several packaging practices in order to mislead consumers. First, packaging sizes and the
relation between packaging size and its content and similar strategies (e.g. adding gifts) are
employed in order to lead the consumer into thinking that there is greater quantity of the
product. Second, the design of the packaging implies wrongful or misleading information.
Third, producers imitate another’s packaging in order to imply a certain geographic
provenance or quality of the product. Finally, the price may be wrongfully indicated or absent
from the packaging. There is a slight degree of skepticism among consumers about quality of
products in the market, there is obvious mistrust of the communications manufacturers use to
attract buyers to those products. It is possible for the majority of consumers to consider that
manufacturers’ procedures for handling complaints and settling complaints are not
satisfactory. Hence, marketing scholars and practitioners have long been interested in
consumers’ perceptions of, and their reactions to different marketing practices. In particular,
ethical considerations in advertising are a long-standing issue. Advertising is the most visible
and the most criticized component of marketing communications. Indeed, some questionable
(i.e. ads to children, alcohol and tobacco ads, negative political ads) and deceptive/misleading
advertising practices are the very reason for putting the advertising under fire. As a form of
persuasive communication, advertising can easily be used to mislead the target audience. So,
deceptive or misleading advertising should be legally defined as: the standard that has
generally relied on what a reasonable consumer would take away from an advertisement
under the circumstances. Attas (1999) argued that an advertisement will be deemed
misleading or deceptive only if it is reasonable to expect that persons exposed to it, or those
targeted by it, would come to hold false beliefs as a result of exposure to it. It might be
thought that the consumer mislead by an advertisement will be tempted to buy the advertised
product and in that way either getting less than he thought he would or paying more than he
should. Furthermore, the consumer’s skepticism about the fairness of advertising can cause
them to ignore ethical consideration for buying products.
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Unfair pricing is also a burning consumerist issue since pricing is the most sensitive issue
to the consumers. Ethically, price should be equal or proportional to benefit which is taken by
the consumers. Additional ethical issues connected to pricing consist of non-price price
increases, misleading price reduction, price advertisements which can be misleading or
considered as deceitful and their limits are not explained well, the practices of price fixing
that affect the structure of competition, predatory pricing which aims to have monopolistic
position, discriminatory pricing, pricing applications of products according to the products’
unit or quantity basis and practicing of misleading pricing (1995) argued that consumers’
skepticism regarding the environmental consumerism practice discourage them to be
involved in ethical and pro-environmental purchas-ing33. These practices also known as
green marketing and green marketing refers to the development and distribution of
ecologically-safe products.
Generally, each of the three journals has extensively published articles on some specific
themes compared to the other two journals. The journal of Marketing Science has published
more articles in e-marketing, channels of distribution, competitive analysis, and marketing
ethics. The Journal of marketing has published more articles on branding, sales and sales
management, value creation, services and service quality, customer relationship management,
international marketing, social responsibility, and customer loyalty. The Journal of Marketing
Research has published more articles on consumer behavior, branding, pricing, retailing, and
customer satisfaction.
14. Challenges of Green Marketing
1. Green products require renewable and recyclable material, which is costly.
2. Problems of deceptive advertising and false claims.
3. Requires a technology, which requires huge investments in research and development.
4. Majority of the people are not aware of green products and their uses.
5. Majority of the consumers are not willing to pay a premium for green products.
6. Educating customers about the advantages of green marketing.
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Countries ranked according to their response level on green marketing rank countries
RANK COUNTRIES
1 INDIA
2 UK
3 US
4 THAILAND
5 AUSTRALIA
6 CANADA
7 CHINA
15. Direction for Future Research
The researcher during his study and investigation came across certain areas which still remain
unexplored. Hence the researcher has felt that further studies can be undertaken on the
following areas:
• Automobile industry-consumer buying behavior trends for eco-friendly product.
• Automobile dealer’s role in creating awareness for eco-friendly products and ultimately
for environment protection. Along with above there lies immense scope of further
research on green marketing in emerging economies like India, as people in these nations
are highly aware of green issues and have positive attitude to go for green. There is not
much research done on green philosophy in developing nations like India and many types
of researches can be performed in the context of green; such as:
• An in-depth study on rural Indian consumers can be performed to know their awareness,
concern and attitude towards green marketing.
• Research can be done on Indian Power Sector with respect to green power.
• Indian housing sector with reference to green houses or green buildings.
• Indian Tourism Industry with respect to green tourism.
• Financial sector with green investment versus Non Green
16. Future Of Green Marketing
This paper is not complete without discussing the future of green marketing. There are many
lessons to be learned to avoid green marketing myopia, the short version of all this is that
effective green marketing requires applying good marketing principles to make green
products desirable for consumers. The question that remains, what is green marketing's
future? Green has become a central part of the business discussion for a lot of reasons.
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Companies are feeling pressure from a whole range of stakeholders, including customers,
employees and vendors. Then there are tangible mega environmental pressures such as
climate change and water shortages that are evolving no matter what the economic situation
is. Combine all these forces, and there really is no choice anymore. But there are great
proactive reasons to look at the business through a green lens. It saves money, reduces risk,
drives innovation for new product development and builds brand value and loyalty. Evidence
indicates that successful green products have avoided green marketing myopia by following
important principles:-
1. Know your Customer: Make sure that the consumer is aware of and concerned about the
issues that your product attempts to address.
2. Educating your Customers: Educating your customers is not just a matter of letting
people know you're doing whatever you're doing to protect the environment, but also a
matter of letting them know why it matters. Otherwise, for a significant portion of your
target market, it's a case of "So what?" and your green marketing campaign goes
nowhere.
3. Being Genuine & Transparent: Being Genuine &Transparent means that a) you are
actually doing what you claim to be doing in your green marketing campaign and b) the
rest of your business policies are consistent with whatever you are doing that's
environmentally friendly. Both these conditions have to be met for your business to
establish the kind of environmental credentials that will allow a green marketing
campaign to succeed.
4. Reassure the Buyer: Consumers must be made to believe that the product performs the
job it's supposed to do. They won't forgo product quality in the name of the environment.
5. Consider Your Pricing: If you're charging a premium for your product-and many
environmentally preferable products cost more due to economies of scale and use of
higher-quality ingredients, make sure those consumers can afford the premium and feel
it's worth it.
6. Giving your Customers an Opportunity to Participate: means personalizing the
benefits of your environmentally friendly actions, normally through letting the customer
take part in positive environmental action
7. Thus Leading Brands should Recognize that Consumer Expectations have Changed:
It is not enough for a company to green its products, consumers expect the products that
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they purchase pocket friendly and also to help reduce the environmental impact in their
own lives too.
17. Conclusions
Green marketing should not be considered as just one more approach to marketing, instead
should be pursued with greater vigor as it has societal and environmental dimensions. With
this view organizations are now aware with the fact that without adopting green in the core of
their strategy they cannot survive in the present competitive era. Automobile companies are
also adopting green to retain their image in the market.
Finally, consumers, industrial buyers and suppliers need to intensify the efforts to minimize
the negative effects of the environment-friendly marketing in the context of green marketing
assuming even more importance and relevance in developing countries like India. This study
concludes with a call to the other sectors other than automobile sector also to pursue eco-
friendly initiatives to foster long term growth in the economy
18. Declaration
The above given submission is completely original and gathered by me through the searching
of various author’s books and it is not copied from other conference proceedings
19. References
1. From the book of “ The New Rules of Green Marketing “ by
2. https://lautrecouleur.com/green-marketing-advantages-disadvantages/ - Green marketing
advantages & disadvantages.
3. http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/marketing/green-marketing-evolution-reasons-
advantages-and-challenges/32326/ : Challenges of green marketing.
4. From MARKETING STRATEGIES Book Part II