A comparison of proactive and reactive environmental strategies in green product innovation

Abstract

Companies are exposed to different kinds of pressures to respond to environmental sustainability issues. It is critical to understand how firms integrate environmental issues into their corporate agendas and how these integration strategies affect corporate performance. This paper investigates factors that motivate firms to adopt environmental marketing strategies and their relative impact on green product innovation performance. A comprehensive conceptual framework is developed and tested that portrays the antecedents and consequences of environmental marketing strategy (EMS). The results show that developing environmental strategies that exceed regulations (proactive strategies) leads to better new product performance than those that only adhere to regulations (reactive strategies). In addition, we find that commitment from top management becomes critical only for proactive strategies, not for reactive strategies. Finally, with regard to the consequences, we show that environmental marketing strategies lead to new product advantage and, ultimately, improved sustainable new product performance.