Beyond Greening Strategies for a Sustainable World Green Marketing Legend Myth

¶ … Green Marketing: Legend, Myth, Farce or Prophesy?

This article reviews the popularity of many businesses embracing the concept of "green marketing" as it became popular in the early 1990s after being in existence since the 1970s as a way to move toward sustainability. By the mid-1990s; however, the response from consumers did not live up to earlier market research projects and some major opted to discontinue their green brands of certain products. This has led to the disillusionment of consumers and the slowdown in the amount of new "green" products that have been introduced into the market since the 1990s.This raises the question of whether "green marketing" has failed or is it a concept that the world was not ready for to begin with (p. 357).

Methodology

The authors examine how the green marketing theory has been practiced in the 15 years using the methodology used in King's 1985 article, "Has Marketing Failed, or Was It Never Really Tried?" that appeared in the Journal of Marketing Management. This is done in an attempt to determine why the "green movement" has not been successful in achieving the response that was originally imagined (p. 358).

Key Findings

The authors identified five areas that King identified as mainstream marketing practices where it appears "green marketing" has failed in its development. Green spinning, which was used by companies who were in industries that were polluting the environment to begin with, led to consumers being skeptical of their motives. Green selling where companies produced a new green product, but continued to produce the regular version also led to consumer suspicion. The label of green harvesting was given to the practice of businesses choosing not to use environmental claims to boost sales after grabbing the obvious "low hanging fruit" because most consumers found green products to be more expensive and it would not be in the financial best interest for the business to continue marketing. The approach of enviropreneur marketing failed because the smaller firms could not successfully go against the larger businesses that created green lines of products for less money. Compliance marketing failed as these businesses would do as little as possible to comply with green standards; this also led to consumers being skeptical of the sincerity of these firms (p. 360-4).

Contributions

Businesses that wish to pursue "green marketing" need to develop a holistic approach that encompasses all aspects surrounding their green products (i.e. production, disposal, company sustainability) in order to lessen the consumer response of cynicism and the threat of being perceived as hypocrites and just riding the trend for profit. It is suggested that more needs to be done via tax incentives, education, and investments to encourage more businesses and consumers to adopt the green movement (p. 367-8).

Review of Beyond Greening: Strategies for a Sustainable World

Literature Review/Theoretical Framework

This article addresses the challenges that exist to develop a sustainable global economy as the world becomes more industrialized in the growing free market economy. Only one sixth of the world is currently industrialized and account for more than 75% of consumption of the world's energy and resource consumed (p. 68). As lesser-developed economies grow and become more urbanized, the threat to the environment will only increase.

Methodology

The authors identify the three different economies, the market economy, the survival economy, and the nature economy and evaluate their ecological footprints on the environment. They evaluate the challenges that exist to the achieving sustainability for each of these economies.

Key Findings