46 Devleena Ghosh and Amit Jain
Table 3.4 Consumer skepticism about green practices of the organizations
Statement Mean Std. Deviation
Organizations manufacturing/promoting green
products are really concerned about the environment?3.57 1.024found that the respondents were not familiar with many of the environmental
initiatives undertaken by government bodies, NGOs, or corporations in India
(see Table 3.3). Therefore, corporations, NGOs, and government bodies need to
improve their public communication practices so as to better engage consumers
in environmentally sustainable initiatives.
Conclusion
Both the empirical data and the secondary literature demonstrate that the level of
awareness about and preference for green products is high among consumers in
India and that they approve of green marketing practices; consumers generally
feel that environmental degradation has escalated in the last decade and expect it
to deteriorate further in the next 5 years and are of the opinion that governments
and corporations are not doing enough to ameliorate environmental damage.
It is also evident that consumers approve of cause-related marketing and
philanthropic activities undertaken by corporations. Such campaigns help
to build trust and positive social capital for these organizations and enhance
their profitability and competitive advantage. These findings demonstrate that
corporations and governments should make the most of the opportunities to align
their corporate and philanthropic goals with green marketing practices since this
is likely to both enhance profit and fulfill their CSR objectives.
Dipesh Chakrabarty points out that in the age of the Anthropocene, humans
have to be viewed simultaneously on contradictory registers: as a geophysical force
and as a political agent, as bearers of rights and as an author of actions; subject to
both the stochastic forces of nature (being itself one such force collectively) and
open to the contingency of individual human experience; belonging at once to
differently scaled histories of the planet, of life and species, and of human societies
(Chakrabarty 2012, p. 15). In this context, green and/or cause-related marketing
raises some interesting paradoxes about the moral economy of consumption in
India. Is the Indian middle class in thrall to brand culture and conspicuous spending?
Or are there significant sections of it that wish to differentiate themselves from the
lower classes by purchasing goods that may have the desirable brand but also have
the added value of contributing to a cause? In the latter case, such consumers are
then in the win-win position of helping the underprivileged without compromising
the safety of their middle-class status. Hawkins comments,
Project Shiksha bridges this gap well by promoting itself as a “national
consumer movement that empowers consumers across the country to
participate and support education of marginalised children in India” (India