1.0 Introduction
1.1 Background
Over the recent years the threat of global warming due to environment pollution has become so real. Consumers businesses are known to be the biggest contributors to environmental degradation which has result to global warming. This has lead to an increased call for companies to engage in sustainable business practices where their operation will have very limited negative impacts on the environment (Cherian and Jacob 2012).
Today, companies are not only complying with legislation regard environment, but are also going extra mile to invest in production of green products (i.e. environment friendly product), label, promote and distribute their product in an eco-friendly environment in order to gain competitive advantage (Cherain and Jacob 2012). This practice has been termed as green marketing (Laddha and Malviya 2015).
Unfortunately, there is insufficient empirical studies to shows whether green marketing does influences consumer attitude and hence the decision to purchase the products. As a result, there is confusion in the corporate world in regard to whether green marketing can give a company a competitive advantage or not.
Based on the context above, the proposed study will investigate consumers’ attitude toward the eco-friendly products in order to understand whether green marketing can really give companies competitive advantage.
2.0 Literature Review
2.1 Introduction
In this section, the available literature relating to the topic of interest will be critically analyzed in order to understand their finding. Specifically, only literature relating to green marketing and consumers attitude will be analyzed
2.2 Green marketing
According to the Cherian and Jacob (2012), Green marketing refers to marketing a product as environmentally friendly and safe. A more comprehensive definition is given by Polonsky (2011) who describe green marketing as the efforts by a company to design, price, promote and distributes products in a manner that will have minimal detrimental impacts on the natural environment. For the purpose of this paper, green marketing will cover all marketing activities including designing, promoting, distributing and pricing which are undertaken by companies in a way that is environmentally safe and friendly.
The evolution of green marketing can be trace back to the increased pressure from media, governments, lobby group and environmentalist for companies to exhibit eco-friendly behaviour for the sake of the environment .As result, companies started packing and presenting their products in an environmentally friendly manner (Cherian and Jacob 2012). However, over the recent years, Companies has shifted from practicing environmental marketing practices as compliances to legislation, to a genuine effort to sustainable marketing practice that are eco-friendly with the hope of gaining competitive advantage (Polonsky 2011). Some of the most common green marketing techniques used by company to gain competitive advantages are eco labelling, eco-branding and environmental advertising
Eco-labelling
Eco labelling is one of the most common green marketing tools used by marketer. It refers to practice of using label to show or create a perception that a product is environment friendly (Rex and Baumann).
Eco branding