Driving Green Marketing in a Developing Country

Abstract

Despite having a pro-environment attitude, customers may not consistently reflect the same in their behaviour. This chapter explores the applicability of the social-normalisation theory to reduce the attitude-behaviour gap of customers for driving green behaviour in India. The theory argues that green behaviour can be driven by positioning green activities as normal. The chapter details the findings of an empirical study done across 496 customers pan India. Analysis done based on various techniques (Heat maps, factor analysis and regression) indicates that while a broader consensus existed among customers about what is green, the conceptions of normality of the activities vary thereby, corroborating the existence of an attitude-behaviour gap. Results shows that perceptions of what is normal have a significantly higher impact than perceptions of what is green and hence, social-normalisation theory can be applied to drive green marketing in developing countries like India.