Dal green marketing mix negato, tollerato e comunicato a quello vissuto: evoluzione e mappatura nelle PMI italiane: presentazione della ricerca

Objectives. The concept of green marketing has become a buzzword in the last decade as a result of an intense increase in environmental consciousness worldwide. Consumers are progressively realizing the importance of protecting the environment through product choices while companies are gradually more considering the impact of their activities onto the environment. Thus, an ever-increasing number of companies and other organizations want to make their operations sustainable. Moreover, expectations that long-term profitability should embrace social justice and protect the environment nowadays have taken on. These expectations are only set to increase and intensify. As the need to move to a truly sustainable economy is interpreted by companies’ and organizations’ shareholders, customers and other stakeholders in general to improve the social value. More specifically, “green” concerns have become ever more crucial for decision makers in order to obtain a competitive advantage in particular since companies have to deal with new public sensitivity, severe regulation, and growing stakeholder pressure motivated on protecting the environment (Leonidou et al. 2013; Hult 2011; Maignan and Ferrel 2004; Banerjee et al. 2003; Pratesi, 1999). It’s important to note that the focus on sustainable consumption and production is not new and represents a strategy and research imperative, started in the mid-1990s' with environmental documents, agreements and reports from the transnational organizations such as OECD, UNFCCC (and the subsequent Kyoto Protocol) and World Business Council for Sustainable Development (Papadas et al. 2017; Peattie and Crane 2005). For these reasons, green marketing has been also well recognized as broader concept by scientific community and defined in various ways all over the world (Osman et al. 2016). Many terms were used to describe this concept (Prakash 2002): environmental marketing (Coddington 1993), ecological marketing (Fisk 1974; Henion and Kinnear 1976), green marketing (Peattie 1995; Ottman 1992), sustainable marketing (Fuller 1999) and greener marketing (Charter and Polonsky 1999). Our work uses the term “green marketing” to refer to the strategies of the marketing mix to product, distribute and promote products by employing environmental applications. Clearly, green marketing is only a part of the overall corporate strategy in sustainability (Prakash 2002; Menon and Menon, 1997). The term has also been described as an organization’s effort at designing, promoting, pricing and distributing products that will not harm the environment (Fuller 1999). Firms that implement holistic environmental strategies send a strong positive message to their stakeholders. In order to send this message today, some companies try to achieve the “green” in everything, from their ground level manufacturing to their top management and one way of being environmentally friendly is to use green marketing. This is because Green marketing is the holistic management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying the needs of customers and society in a profitable and sustainable way (Peattie & Crane, 2005). Green marketing is today used by many companies and it deals with all the activities designed to generate and facilitate any exchanges intended to satisfy human needs and wants, with a minimal effect on the natural environment (Polonsky and Rosenberger 2001; Peatty 1999). There are different approaches to green marketing where some companies are more environmentally responsible than others. Despite the consequential managerial interest, few empirical studies have examined sustainability issues in marketing strategy (Leonidou et al. 2013; Cronin et al. 2011) and so marketing literature is failing in order to understand this concept from an academic and empirical point of view, focusing on SMEs. For now, as a result, knowledge about green marketing practices is still limited for both managers and policy makers (Chabowski et al. 2011; Etzion 2007). This paper addresses the need for a more integrated and holistic overview and analysis of green marketing practice through the development of a conceptualization of green marketing status of Italian SME’s to capture the organizational facets and situation in this field. The purpose of this research is double. Firstly, it aims at exploring the international and national body of literature, studies and projects on sustainability as well as policies framework for defining green marketing mix at company level. Secondly, it aims at analyse quantitative secondary data and conduct quantitative research and analysis in order to understand the status of the implementation of the green marketing from the Italian SMEs perspective. This paper aims to answer the following research questions: RQ1: what is the state of the art about the green marketing mix in the Italian SMEs? RQ2: Is it possible to map and cluster these companies according to their green marketing mix? Methodology. The present work follows a quantitative approach to collect and analyse data. First step was to administer a survey to a number of Italian SMEs. The questionnaire consists in three parts. Following the first part in which general information are asked about participating firms and respondents (Position of the respondent, Annual Turnover, Company Experience/Age, Number of Employees and Type of Industry), the second part was designed to investigate about the efforts in terms of financial resources and investments in green for what concerns the marketing mix and in particular the four main Ps (Product, Place, Price, Promotion). For the third section we used scales developed by Leonidou et al. (2013) (17 items for the green marketing mix) and by Papadas et al. (2017) (13 items for the green marketing orientation) covering the evaluation of contingencies that may affect the leverages of the marketing mix and the green marketing orientation. This last part was measured by 7-point Likert scale (Table 1).