مجموعه بازاریابی سبز و تاثیر منابع مازاد و ریسک گریزی مدیریت بر آن

ABSTRACT “Greening” the marketing mix: do firms do it and does it pay off?

“Green” issues have become increasingly important to corporate decision makers as firms face mounting public sensitivity, stricter regulation, and growing stakeholder pressures focused on preserving the natural environment (Banerjee et al. 2003; Hult 2011; Maignan and Ferrell 2004). Increasing numbers of customers have also begun shifting their preferences to more environmentally friendly 1 products and services (Kotler 2011; Luchs et al. 2010). Despite the resultant managerial interest, few empirical studies have examined sustainability issues in marketing strategy (Cronin et al. 2011). As a result, knowledge about green marketing practices remains limited for both managers and policy makers (Chabowski et al. 2011; Etzion 2007).

Two key gaps persist in existing knowledge. First, although there is much debate about the likely outcomes of environmentally friendly marketing approaches, surprisingly few empirical studies have examined their impact on firm performance. The few performance outcome studies undertaken to date have adopted widely differing approaches and been published in specialist journals. Thus, managers neither know whether “greening” their firms’ marketing practices makes strategic and financial sense nor understand the contingencies that may affect the answer to these questions (Cronin et al. 2011). Second, even if more environmentally friendly marketing programs make sense, current understanding of how managers can best begin greening their firms’ marketing efforts is far from comprehensive. The limited number of prior studies in this area have identified several external “triggers” (e.g., public concern, regulatory pressure) but relatively few internal factors (e.g., top management commitment) that are conducive to this process (e.g., Banerjee et al. 2003). We identify and empirically examine two new internal factors that have largely been overlooked: slack resources and top management risk aversion (Menguc et al. 2010; Miles and Covin 2000).

Our study addresses these knowledge gaps and makes two primary contributions. First, we examine the product market and return-on-assets (ROA) performance effects of environmentally friendly product, pricing, distribution, and promotion programs. We find that greening marketing programs can deliver product-market and financial performance benefits. However, we show that these benefits may vary across different green marketing program components and identify the key role of the industry’s environmental reputation in conditioning some of these relationships. Our results suggest that researchers need to allow for different levels of greenness in individual marketing program components and capture industry-level variables in theorizing and empirically studying green marketing. Our findings also have important implications for managers in terms of where and how they should expect to achieve payback benefits from investments in greening marketing programs.

Second, we provide evidence of the critical role of slack resources and top management risk aversion in the deployment of green marketing programs. In addition, we explore interaction effects and find that competitive intensity enhances the impact of slack resources on some components of green marketing programs. Our results also reveal that slack resources and top management risk aversion are substitutes in enabling green marketing programs. Although both factors may be potentially important in understanding how firms respond to environmental challenges (e.g., Menon and Menon 1997; Sharma 2000), neither has been the subject of prior empirical examination. Importantly, our findings suggest that managers wishing to green their firms’ marketing efforts need to adopt different approaches depending on the availability of slack financial resources, the competitive intensity in the marketplace, and the level of risk aversion of their top managers.

We begin by briefly reviewing the sustainability literature relevant to green marketing and use this to ground our conceptualization of green marketing programs. Next, we explain the theoretical foundation of our research model and develop hypotheses for the key relationships we identify. We then describe the research methods, present our hypothesis testing results, and discuss theoretical and practical implications. Finally, we consider limitations of our study and identify promising avenues for further research.