By Shweta Bapat
Thousands of companies are proactively responding climate change through Green Marketing practices. Green marketing is a new marketing approach that is also called as Environmental Marketing or Eco-Marketing. It is considered to be the marketing of the product and a company that promote environment. Green marketing is understood as a marketing of the product that is environment friendly or environmentally safe.
Green Marketing Dimension
But it is not the only dimension of green marketing to market environmental friendly product. It integrates many activities from product modification to modification of marketing strategies. Therefore it is definitely more than just marketing an environmental friendly product.
Defining Green Products
Are all environmentally safe products, green products? Environmentally safe products do not harm the environment. Green products also do not harm the environment but along with that they reduce exploitation of resources, minimises carbon footprint, can be recycled and reused, and maintains ecological balance. For e.g. Tissue papers are environmentally safe products as they get recycled easily and if not they are at least biodegradable and unlike plastic.
Handkerchiefs as Green Products
But Handkerchiefs are the green products because along with the property of being environmentally safe and biodegradability it also doesn’t exploit natural resources like tree cuts. Its unlimited reusability and low carbon footprint is the most important advantage of it as green product.
Holistic Approach of Green Marketing
Green marketing is a holistic approach that involves, modification of product, changes in the production process, eco-friendly packaging and changes in advertisements of the product are also a part of green marketing concept.
Emergence of Green Marketing
This term came in late 80s and 90s. It gained importance and attention of wise customers on the background of unhealthy marketing practices like exaggerating and misleading advertisements, misguiding promotional schemes introduced by companies to increase market share, misleading packaging etc. Intelligent customer understood these tactics and marketing gimmicks of the companies and got attracted towards green marketing practices which were comparatively more transparent and were gaining the trust of customers.
Consumer Interest in Green Products
Recently, a large number of consumers are showing interest in purchasing green products. As reflected in many of the surveys the responsible customers prefer green products and are even ready to pay more for the green products.
Awareness Gap
The interviews of 16,823 consumers in 15 countries were conducted by IPSOS MORI to examine consumers and workers, environmental attitudes and behaviour, and it was found that workers and consumer show more environmental friendly attitudes. But there is still a large part of consumers that is not aware about concept and details of green marketing.
Spreading Awareness
It is important that companies need to take efforts to spread the awareness about the green marketing among the customers. Projecting the importance of green marketing, convincing and converting consumers is the big challenge in-front companies but if it is accepted by the companies there is chance of capturing the wise consumers and large market share for the long term. It is well known and well accepted that the problem of global warming is increasing day by day and if the responsible companies are addressing the this issue along with its consumers then the sustainability of the business can be definitely ensured.
About the Author
Mrs. Shweta Bapat, HoD Human Resource Management, Kaveri College of Arts, Science and Commerce, Pune
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