Green marketing is a developing arena in the marketing department. It refers to the procedure whereby products and services are sold on the basis of their environmental advantages.

In such a case, products can be of two types. They can either be produced in an environmentally friendly manner or they can be packaged in an environmentally way. Green marketing is based on an assumption- that the customers will view a product or service as environment friendly and then implement their buying choices accordingly.

But there is one assumption that green marketing does not look upon as very obvious. This is the increase of prices of a product the moment it is termed as green. Consumers think that since a product is green so consumers will be willing to pay more for it. This might not be the case always.

Green marketing does have scope with environmental awareness becoming the main focus in a lot of societies nowadays. But it might not be a bed of roses for green marketing.

Some of the consumers tend to be skeptical about the green claims. So if some false claims are discovered behind a company’s green claims or if the company produces some products that tend to contradict the green claims of one of its product, then company brands might be seriously damaged. When a service or a product is presented as a green product when it is not it is termed “green washing”.

Advantages

There are many advantages of such marketing. For starters, it gives the host company an edge over its competitors. The company also might find some opportunities which other companies might not get. Corporate Social Responsibilities (CSR) is a big part of most companies’ social responsibility by which they try to give back something to the people. Green marketing helps to do that.

In recent times, even the government has begun to put pressure on companies to go green. On the other hand, companies also prefer to go green because of the rising competition in the market. Green marketing helps a company to be “different” from its competitors. Going green can also help a company raise more profit.

Disadvantages

The first disadvantage of green marketing is that it requires a lot of recyclable and renewable materials. This is not easy to find and definitely not cheap. Green products also require a huge investment in technology. Hence they are costly. They also require the technology of water treatment. Even this is expensive.

After so much of investment, the company has to make the people aware of green products because even as of now, a lot of consumers are not very aware of green services and products.

Lastly even if consumers are aware of green products why should they pay a huge sum for green products when they can get the same product from alternative sources for a fraction of the price? These are answers that the corporate industry is still searching for.

Green marketing has come a long way but it still has miles to go.

Source by Pepik Smith