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Green marketing is one of the hottest trends being used by marketers these days. In 1989 it barely existed, but by 1990 it was all the rage. In the past decade, Americans have displayed an increasing concern for the environment as they begin to realize it is slowly deteriorating. More than seventy percent of the 180 million tons of trash disposed each year in the United States is buried in landfills, and the landfills are reaching capacity. On top of this, the hole in the ozone layer continues to grow larger, threatening numerous amounts of people with skin cancer. In response, companies must begin to make changes to their products, their claims, packaging, and manufacturing processes in order to offer consumers a cleaner and safer environment. Some companies have already started to engage in "green marketing activities." For example, Procter and Gamble is now packaging Tide, Cheer, Era, and Dash in bottles made of twenty five percent recycled plastic and has introduced the first ever concentrated fabric softener refill package. Many other companies have also jumped on the new environmental marketing bandwagon. The problem with green marketing has been that the sales of these products have no
Seventy-nine percent of the students polled normally purchased environmentally concerned products over normal products. Females tended to make ten percent more of these purchases than men did. Since, a large amount of respondents purchased green products more often than non-green products, I wondered if the same decision would be made if the cost of these green products were higher than normal products. I expected the majority of students to say they would not pay more for green products since students generally have limited disposable incomes. However, we were proven wrong because eighty-six percent of the students we polled were willing to pay an extra amount for environmentally safer products. The majority of these individuals, fifty-seven percent, said they would be willing to pay an additional one to five percent for these products. Another twenty-six percent were actually willing to spend six to ten percent extra! After concluding consumers would spend more for environmentally safer products, I wondered what benefit consumers wanted most for this added cost. What we discovered was that a combination of biodegradability, recyclability, reusability, photo-degradability, animal free testing, and the use of less packaging was most important to the consumer. However, if companies need to focus their marketing plans on one benefit it should be recyclability since it was preferred the most at thirty-four percent. The West Virginia University students we polled were asked to answer three personal questions so that a respondent profile could be established. Respondents were asked to indicate their sex, education level, and what political party they were affiliated with. An equal amount, fifty males and fifty females, responded to the questionnaire. The largest number of respondents accounted for were seniors at forty percent. The juniors were the second largest group surveyed at twenty-nine percent, followed by freshmen at fourteen percent, sophomores at twelve percent, and graduate students at five percent
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1362
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)
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