Green marketing and its impact on supply chain management in industrial markets

Outline

• Abstract
• Keywords
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Green Marketing Strategy
• 3. Green Supply Chain Management
• 3.1. Corporate Performance
• 3.2. Product Development
• 3.3. Lean
• 3.4. Distribution and Reverse Logistics
• 4. the Enabling Role of Technology and Innovation for Green Supply Chain
• 5. Scanning the Issues
• References
• Vitae

Scanning the issues

This special issue consists of 7 high quality papers, each of which has been gone through at least two rounds of review by at least three reviewers. These 7 papers cover a wide range of green management issues, such as green SCM and performance, greener product development and innovation, sustainability orientation, integration of green marketing and green SCM, comparison between B2B and B2C green SCM, and so on. The papers cover both public sectors and private sectors; use either quantitative hypotheses testing research, qualitative inductive research, or framework development for new green practice (i.e. resource constrained product development). This special issue is truly international, as data used in papers in this issue come from multiple countries, such as UK, China, France, Singapore, and so on.

Cheng and Sheu’s (this issue) work provides insights into how the positive effect of relationship orientation on inter-organizational strategy quality can be moderated by the opportunistic behaviors and dysfunctional conflict of partnership in green supply chains. This is in contrast to previous studies which are more focusing on the antecedents to inter-organizational strategy quality. In addition, their study contributes to green supply chain research by integrating the perspective of economic and relational view in the study of the relational governance in green supply chains, which is not dealt with in previous studies. Finally, this paper extends current research by highlighting the role of value-based relationships from the economic and relational view of partners.

Oruezabala and Rico (this issue) investigate the effect of sustainable orientation on agreements and procurement contracts. The business marketing literature has not previously addressed public procurement practices. This research explores the consequences of greener expectations on buyer–seller relationships from the public purchasers’ point of view. A qualitative investigation reveals that new environmental regulations call for new rules within formal and relational norms. Sustainable procurement implies new environmental requirements, the supplier base reduction, a need for continuous innovation, legitimacy of the purchasing function and a total cost of ownership approach. Consequently, both the level and the nature of expectations from providers are changing. Oruezabala and Rico (this issue) assert that sustainable public procurement tends to focus on fewer key suppliers with “green” skills and that procurement process needs to turn implicit norms into explicit ones in terms of environmental impact, value creation for end users (patients) or economic sustainability of hospitals.

The key research question of Liu, Kasturiratne and Moizer’s (this issue) work is on how to coherently integrate green marketing with sustainable supply chain management, so that green customer’s needs can be better met from both demand and supply sides. The paper discusses a hub-and-spoke model which addresses the integration from multiple dimensions, namely the 6Ps (product, promotion, planning, process, people and project). Compared with conventional point-to-point B2B integration, the proposed 6Ps integration model enables more effective information, materials, people and funds flow between marketing and supply chain activities. The 6Ps integration model has been evaluated through empirical study with industrial managers. Key contributions of the paper include a number of managerial implications which have been elicited through the theoretical and empirical studies of the 6Ps integration model, as well as key drivers and obstacles which have been identified for multi-dimensional integration of green marketing and sustainable supply chain management. The paper has high relevance to the Special Issue as it addresses one of key themes the Special Issue encourages, i.e. the interplay between green/sustainable supply chain management and green marketing.