Designing Green Marketing Across Industries: A Conceptual Framework and Implications for Consumers and Transdisciplinary Research

Understanding what marketing messages trigger sustainable consumer behavior is one of the key issues for companies to be able to design effective green marketing. The goal of this paper is to present a conceptual framework for a green marketing approach that includes product, industry, production processes, and supply chain specific considerations to be utilized in the design of green product marketing for the mass markets. Based on a literature review, we have created a conceptual framework with industry-specific aspects on the basis of unique features in seven industrial sectors that are of relevance to the personal needs of consumers from an environmental perspective, but are focusing on the product-specific aspects of the marketed products. The originality of this study lies in the proposition that green marketing should use the actual product features as a starting point and not focus only on green consumers. The greenness of a product should be an additional dimension that adds to the competitiveness of the product when compared to conventional products. Theoretically, we propose that a transdisciplinary approach that integrates sustainable supply chain management perspectives to green marketing would benefit companies designing green marketing approaches and consumers making green product choices.