Crafting Enviropreneurial Marketing Through Green Innovation: A Natural Resource-Based View

Abstract

Being green is widely recognized as a proactive strategy to create economic value hand in hand with environmental sustainability in a new competitive landscape. Taking environment as commitment, righteousness, and opportunity, enviropreneurial marketing (EM) gives rise to environment-specific values and behaviors and is paving a way to achieve differential advantages over competitors by fulfilling responsibilities. Building on the tenets of the natural-resource-based view, we offer a deeper understanding of the framework by which EM could promote firm performance through green innovation. Empirical evidence, based on a survey from manufacturing firms in China, supports the developed theoretical framework with a moderated mediation analysis. Specifically, the adoption of EM is more likely to bring about better green innovation, in turn, improves firm performance. Moreover, it is observed that the closure mechanism acts as a negative moderator. When it is high, the development of green innovation capabilities is seriously constrained. These findings highlight that EM is jointly driven by executives and employees within the firm, rather than by external pressures.