Green Marketing Strategy of Businesses

Green marketing has been an important academic research topic since it came about (Coddington, 1993; Fuller, 1999; Ottman, 1994). Attention was drawn to the subject in the late 1970’s when the American Marketing Association organized the first ever workshop on ‘Ecological Marketing’ in 1975 which resulted in the first book on the subject, entitled, ‘Ecological Marketing’ by Henion and Kinnear in 1976. The first definition of ‘green marketing’ was according to Henion (1976); “the implementation of marketing programs directed at the environmentally conscious market segment” (Banerjee, 1999, p.18). Peattie and Crane (2005) claims that despite the early development, it was only in the late 1980’s that the idea of green marketing actually made an appearance, because of the consumers’ growing interest in green products, increased awareness and willingness to pay for green features. Henion’s (1976) definition of green marketing has evolving and many more definitions of green marketing have arisen throughout the years. One of the latter definitions is Fuller’s (1999, p. 4): The process of planning, implementing, and controlling the development, pricing, promotion, and distribution of products in a manner that satisfies the following three criteria: (1) customer needs are met, (2) organizational goals are attained, and (3) the process is compatible with ecosystems. The first indication of consumer interest in green products came through Vandermerwe and Oliff‟s (1990) survey. This stated that more than 92% of European multinationals claimed to have changed their products in response to green concerns and 85% claimed to have changed their product systems (Peattie & Crane, 2005). Green product introductions increased by more than double to 11.4% of all new household products in the USA between 1989 and 1990, and continued to rise to 13.4% in 1991 (ibid.). However, this optimistic start to the 1990’s was not sustained (Peattie & Crane, 2005. A