Green Marketing Strategies and Marketing Performance: The Case of Turkey

Introduction

Today when environmental interests and awareness of the consumers have come to increase, more and more consumers have started to demand environmentally friendly products and services from the businesses. In addition to the businesses that emphasize the environmental issues, the businesses that have noticed the environmental demands and preferences of the consumers have tended to develop and implement green marketing strategies (Agrawal & Das, 2013) both during the manufacturing processes and in their marketing approaches (Alsmadi, 2007). This particular trend plays various roles such as the creation of legal regulations related to environment, awareness-rising in terms of the costs and the lack of natural resources, increase in the demands by the community and stakeholders and the activities of the pressure groups (Jones, Clarke-Hill, Comfort, & Hillier, 2008). In other words, it is possible to say that businesses turn to green marketing for reasons such as government pressure, cost issue, competitive pressure, increase consumer base, subsidies from government and social responsibility (Pawar & Kamble, 2016). Currently, green marketing strategy is a very important issue and if businesses think that they are responsible for long term, they will be able to use this strategy very effectively. The sustainable marketing strategy, which is an important strategy, is also a requirement in ensuring the consumer confidence.

Green marketing is comprised of activities that are designed to satisfy the wants and needs of the individuals, and have minimal detrimental effect on the natural environment (Nair & Menon, 2008). Green marketing is defined as “the holistic management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying the requirements of customers and society in a profitable and sustainable way” (El Dief & Font, 2010, p. 158). This definition emphasizes the significance of market orientation in the process of environmental marketing (Nair & Menon, 2008). From the perspective of macro marketing, Mitchell et al. (2010), on the other hand, recommended the sustainable market orientation and emphasized its importance. Terms such as environmental marketing, ecological marketing and sustainable marketing are used to mean the same as green marketing (Garg, 2015). These concepts reflect an environmental approach from the perspective of marketing. However, sustainable marketing represents an integrative approach that emphasizes environmental (green marketing), social value (social marketing) and economic / financial issues in the development of marketing strategies (Bridges & Wilhelm, 2008). While social marketing, on the one hand, includes the green marketing and sustainable marketing issues such as environmental pollution, nutritional aspects of products and consumer health, it also includes other social issues such as reducing smoking and excessive alcohol consumption in general, demotivating the use of harmful drugs, and increasing the public prosperity. Social marketing campaigns are aimed at changing people's consciousness, values, actions or behaviors in a positive manner (Kotler & Keller, 2012, p. 638). Although sustainable marketing currently focuses on consumers and their needs, it includes the consumers of next generation and meeting their needs (Seretny & Seretny, 2012). From this point of view, it can be said that responsive and proactive market orientations (Narver, Slater, & MacLachlan, 2004; Atuahene-Gima, Slater, & Olson, 2005; Tsai, Chou, & Kuo, 2008; Li, Lin, & Chu, 2008; Zhang & Duan, 2010; Zhang & Duan, 2010a; Bodlaj, 2010; Bodlaj, Coenders, & Zabkar, 2012; Yannopoulos, Auh, & Menguc, 2012; Oswald, Brettel, & Engelen, 2012) are closely related to sustainable marketing. Within the framework of sustainable marketing, environmental marketing or green marketing strategy signifies that consumers' needs are met not only through the commercialization of green products and services, but also through making the systems and processes green (Fraj-Andrés, Martínez-Salinas, & Matute-Vallejo, 2009b). The concept of sustainable production (Ali & Suleiman, 2016) can also be considered at this point.