Green Marketing · elements were selected as per convenience and were asked to return the filled questionnaires ... Consumer Perception About Green ... Coca-Cola has focused

National Conference on Marketing and Sustainable Development October 13-14, 2017

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Green Marketing

Pavan Kumar P S

[email protected]

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

https://lautrecouleur.com/green-marketing-advantages-disadvantages/

http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/marketing/green-marketing-evolution-reasons-advantages-and-challenges/32326/

http://www.yourarticlelibrary.com/marketing/green-marketing-evolution-reasons-advantages-and-challenges/32326/

Documents

Green Marketing · elements were selected as per convenience and were asked to return the filled questionnaires ... Consumer Perception About Green ... Coca-Cola has focused