Green Marketing

Green marketing subsumes greening products as well as greening firms. In addition to manipulating the 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion) of the traditional marketing mix, it requires a careful understanding of public policy processes. This paper focuses primarily on promoting products by employing claims about their environmental attributes or about firms that manufacture and/or sell them. Secondarily, it focuses on product and pricing issues. Drawing on multiple literatures, it examines issues such as what needs to be greened (products, systems or processes), why consumers purchase/do not purchase green products and how firms should think about information disclosure strategies on environmental claims. . A key challenge for marketers is to understand whether consumers view firm/product greening as motivating factors (their presence induces consumers to purchase a given product; preference for a product is an increasing function of the greening level) or hygiene factors (their absence may bother consumers but, after a low threshold of greening, the preference for a product is not an increasing function of the greening level).Although the notion of marketing is more expansive, this paper employs the term green marketing to refer to the strategies to promote products by employing environmental claims either about their attributes or about the systems, policies and processes of the firms that manufacture or sell them. Clearly, green marketing is part and parcel of the overall corporate strategy. Along with manipulating the traditional marketing mix (product, price, place and promotion), it requires an understanding of public policy processes.