Green marketing 743
Marketers are professional communicators.
This skill is enormously useful in virtually every
aspect of environmental management – on the
task force itself, and in such areas as
environmental management training,
emergency response training, community
relations and other domains which put a
premium on communications.
B&Q periodically publishes an environmental
review, incorporating a detailed environmental
policy statement, that defines the responsibili-
ties of different functions, including marketing,
finance, personnel, logistics and systems. The
second of these, published in 1993, articulated
the leadership role that marketing can play in
the greening process:
The marketing director is the main board
director responsible for environmental issues
and is therefore ultimately responsible for
researching the issues, writing the policy and
auditing progress. As marketing director he
also has responsibility to ensure that the envi-
ronmental policies and targets of marketing are
implemented.
In market development B&Q shall monitor
through market research, customers’ concerns
and perceptions on environmental issues and
customers’ understanding and appreciation of
B&Q’s response to them. Market development
will also incorporate environmental considera-
tions into the strategic planning in the company
and refer to strategic environmental issues in
the five year plan.
Marketing services is responsible for most
of the purchasing decisions handled by market-
ing. They shall ensure that ‘Point of Sale’
material, carrier bags and all their other pur-
chases consider environmental specifications.
These include use of recycled post consumer
waste, recyclability, and waste minimization.
Marketing services will ensure that no mislead-
ing environmental statements or claims are
made on any POS material or other commu-
nications such as press enquiries. Marketing
recognizes that some of the products it sells
have distinct environmental attributes, for
energy efficiency equipment and home com-
posting. We also recognize a need to inform ourcustomers more about our environmental poli-
cies and the environmental performance of all
products.Adopting a holistic perspective
Although the marketing philosophy embraces
the entire business, the sphere of influence of
marketing and marketers in practice is often
more limited. Carson’s (1968) observation that,
for many companies, marketing is ‘the integra-
tion, just below senior management level, of
those activities related primarily towards cus-
tomers’, unfortunately still holds true today.
As green issues become important within
markets, green marketing and the management
of eco-performance need to transcend func-
tional boundaries to become pan-organiza-
tional management concerns. This mirrors the
way that quality slipped its functional bonds to
become total quality management (TQM).
Indeed, for many companies the most practical
way of addressing environmental issues has
been through TQM. As social and environmen-
tal pressures on business grow, so marketers
need to have an appreciation of, and input into,
all aspects of a business, its products and its
production system. How energy efficient is our
production process? Where are raw materials
sourced from? Where is spare capital being
invested? How well do we treat our workforce
and suppliers? Such questions were once not
the concern of marketers. Today, they are
increasingly likely to influence the perceptions
of important stakeholders such as customers.
Addressing these questions, and the
demands for answers to them, requires a lot of
new information for marketers and new approa-
ches to the management of that information. A
range of new auditing services is now available
to companies so that their conventional finan-
cial, strategic and marketing audits can be
complemented by social and environmental
audits. Increasing stakeholder demand for
information about eco-performance is requiring
companies to adopt a new openness and to
move away from a view of the production