Green Marketing in Automobile and Ancillary Industry: Issues and Implications

Abstract

Due to the challenges of global warming, nations and people have high concerns for environment protection at the time demand by consumer groups for environmentally friendly products has also increased which led to the emergence of a ‘new marketing philosophy’, known as ‘green marketing’. An increasing integration of aeconomies and growing concern of customers for environment is resulting into higher environmental performance expectations from the industries even in developing countries. Green marketing can be considered to be contributing towards enhancing the environmental performance of industry and an important element of the evolution of the Indian automobile industry as it responds to challenges of environmental regulations, increasing customer expectations and economic pressures. This research paper is an attempt to understand the green marketing practices of automobile and ancillary industry in and around Pune. It also attempts to study underlying factors (controllable and uncontrollable) and their impact on the implementation of green marketing practices and reasons for their implementation. In addition it attempts to study the challenges in executing green marketing practices in Indian context and solutions devised by industries to these challenges. Based on extensive literature review, a hypothesis was formulated and a detailed questionnaire was prepared and circulated among automobile and ancillary industries. The hypothesis was tested by using Friedman test followed by paired sample t test. The results indicate significant variation in terms of the green marketing practices implementation and underlying reasons for their implementation. Uncontrollable forces like, Government Regulations, ccompetitor's environmental activities forcing firm to change conventional activities into environmental friendly activities. They have more influence in comparison with controllable factors on initiating and implementing green marketing practices.