Conventional to Sustainable Marketing: A Review on Transitional Impediments

Abstract

Over the past decade, UNO and all the nations across the world are emphasizing on importance of environmental protectionby initiating certain remedial measures. Environment friendly marketing approaches have been incorporated by business firms to gain competitive advantage in order to contribute to the ongoing movement. Green marketing, being a sustainable business approach and marketing phenomenon has witnessed remarkable attention by such firms as a strategic marketing tool. With the help ofsystematic and constructive literature review, this paper attempts to discuss the current practices, challenges, and probable future scope of ‘Green Marketing’ in India.The review suggests that green marketing is still in its budding stage especially in developing economies like India owing to factors such as market demand, cost of production, poor infrastructure, and lack of investments.Further, inadequate customer awareness and willingness to buy green products, government support and customer affordability are the key challenges to the marketers. Considering the global emphasis, promising start up culture in the domain and subsequent steps taken by the government, ‘Green Marketing’ would see a sharp increase in the future to come. This paper concludes that collaborative efforts by all the concerned stakeholders such as business firms, government, environmental agencies, customers, and venture capitalists can lead to successful implementation of such green marketing initiatives and approaches.