Green marketing and rational choice of customers

Green marketing and rational choice of customers

Introduction

Green marketi8ng is a strategy that is used by the marketers for marketing the products and presenting the product as an environmental friendly product. To some extent, green marketing is effective but now, it has not lived up to the consumer's hopes. Some products that are marketed by using green marketing strategy fails to show any green attributes and does not prove to be green products that are environmental friendly products. It is commonly seen that consumers cannot kill their wishes and desires to be green (Schlegelmilch, et al., 1996). It means that the consumers cannot tradeoff between helping the environment and attributes of the product. Consumers never sacrifice their needs for promoting the green environment. It is seen that green marketed products have hurt the expectations of the consumers and does not proved to be effective green products. Therefore, Peattie (2001) examined that besides, green marketing, consumers rational choice is also involved in buying the products. It can be explained by an example of Ford Motors case. Ford Motors introduces a new two-seater electric car, Ford Think that was announced to be scrapped by Ford because consumers did not buy the car as rational choice of customers was not involved. Similarly, the towels of Procter & Gamble failed to deliver the value of green promise that they made with the customers. Hence, it can be said that while buying a product, a customer's rational choice is also involved along with the effect of green marketing. The cosmetics industry is the best industry to demonstrate that emotive marketing that is a dimension of green marketing is not effective in buying cosmetic products. The purchasing of cosmetic products involves the rational choice of women.

Discussion

Green marketing and involvement of rational choice in buying cosmetic products

Nowadays, emotive marketing is widely used by the marketers for obtaining emotional responses from the consumers. The emotive marketing is a dimension of green marketing that targets the emotions of the consumers. ELM model (elaboration likelihood model) and ARI model (affect reason-involvement model) are the two types of models that are used in green marketing for affecting the perusing the emotional responses of the customers. The cognitive elaboration tales place in both the models because of the higher involvement. In ARI model, the higher involvement of a customer in terms of emotional involvement leads to the greater elaboration ion emotional bonding. A brand can be linked with the emotional bonding of the customers through conditional learning. When a customer is exposed to the advertisement continuously, and by adding a condition, the customer will automatically get emotionally linked with that brand. Green marketing grows the environmental consciousness among the customers by spreading the messages of “go green” and “be green”; it develops linkages between the green brand and attitude of the customers that forms an emotional attitude towards the green brand (Hartman et al., 2005).

However, it is not necessary that the customer gets emotionally linked ...