Green Marketing In India

Green marketing involves developing and promoting products and services that satisfy customers want and need for quality, performance, affordable pricing and convenience without having a detrimental input on the environment. It refers to the process of selling products and/or services based on their environmental benefits. Such a product or service may be environmentally friendly in itself or produced and/or packaged in an environmentally friendly way. Green marketing must satisfy two objectives: improved environmental quality and customer satisfaction. A number of factors have caused business firms in some industries to incorporate an environmental ethic into their operations. The principal factor, of course, is the growing public awareness

After a backlash in the 1990’s, green marketing made an upswing in the Western markets from 2000 onwards (Ottman, 2006). The force of “going-green” is now extending to the Asian region, where environmental threats are alarming local governments and citizens. Like many Asian countries, India suffers from high levels of air pollution, water pollution, high levels of exposure to traffic noise, high level of garbage disposal and rapidly diminishing landfill space. Recently the government and citizens of India have started to realize the seriousness of the environmental threats, and the hazardous economic and health problems. The society as a whole is more ready and willing than before to respond to appeals based on green

According to Uusitalo and Oksanen (2004), ethical consumerism refers to buyer behavior that reflects a concern with the problems that arise from unethical and unjust global trades, such as child and low-paid labour, infringement of human rights, animal testing, labour union suppressions, inequalities in trading relations with the Third World and pollution of the environment (Strong, 1996). Both green consumerism and its subsequent ethical consumerism are forms of symbolic consumption because consumers consider not only individual but also social values, ideals and ideologies (Uusitalo and Oksanen, 2004). Since, the emergence of the green consumerism and ethical consumerism which arose in the mid-1990s, consumers have started to demand a say in the production, processing and resourcing of the products.

Anticipating the continuous uprising forces of consumerism, scholars started to call for “sustainability marketing” in the late-1990s (Charter and Polonsky, 1999). Sustainability marketing refers to the building and maintaining of sustainable relationships with customers, social environment and the natural environment (Charter and Polonsky, 1999). In the face of these challenges, green marketing entered a “self-adjusting” mode, whereby only corporations with a true intention for long-term sustainable business development continued to