Green Sales

Introduction

The fastest-growing industry that has done empirical research since the 1970s and the rapid depletion of scarce resources in mass production depending on the environment by the humanity of careless destruction, the rapid degradation of ecological balance in the universe has become one of the most important problems. Modern enterprises have realized that they cannot be insensitive to environmental problems. In this direction, it is accepted by both business and academic circles that the focus of corporate sustainability is environmental issues. In recent yesildiz, it has become inevitable for businesses to consider green marketing practices when conducting their activities (Shadi-Dizaji, 2017). The increasing expectations of consumers from brands on environmental issues have made it mandatory for businesses to change their marketing understanding. Over time, there has been a significant increase in the number of individuals with environmental concerns, and environmentalism has become important and has been described as the “biggest business issue of the 1990s” (Grove et al., 1996, p. 56). However, the 1990s has been described as the “decade of the environment” and consumers have started to make decisions by putting social and environmental concerns more at the forefront when choosing products and sellers. Thus, there was an increase in the sales of green consumer products in the 1990s. This allowed manufacturers and other operators to consider the environmentalist approach in their decisions regarding marketing and management, in order not to fall behind in the competition. The best example of this is the work of companies such as 3M, DuPont and McDonald's on waste reduction (Menon et al., 1999). As a result, with the introduction of green marketing to the agenda of businesses, changes in marketing practices have emerged (Kılıç & Çalışır, 2020).

Özdoğmuş (2018) mentioned in his study that there is a cost for people to live in a clean and healthy environment and bearing this cost (paying an extra fee) can help to get rid of environmental problems that are irreversible and threaten people in the future. In the related study, it has been explained that in order to ensure the environmental sustainability of consumers, it is necessary to sacrifice some price increases for green sales activities carried out by producers. Zhang et al. (2020), on the other hand, it is mentioned that the companies producing brown are hesitant to offer their products to environmentally sensitive consumer markets. In the related study, it has also been explained that with the rising Consumer Environmental Awareness (TCB), green products are gaining more and more popularity around the world, and those green sales methods should be used in goods and services promotion and sales activities.

Before mentioning the concept of green sales, it is useful to examine the basis of the related concept. At this point, it is known that the concept of green sales is a part of the concept of green marketing. Aylan (2019; as cited in Küçük, 2020, p. 3) mentioned an expansion of the concept of green marketing as follows in his study: “Green marketing has been an issue that has been taken into consideration since the early 1970s. It is the concept of green marketing that takes into account the natural environment at every stage of marketing activities. It is an extension of the social marketing approach that started to develop in the 1970s, depending on the idea of corporate social responsibility. Green management means focusing on alternatives that will cause the least damage to the ecological balance or even eliminate this damage, choosing subcontractors and suppliers with this mentality, taking green products and services beyond being a marketing strategy and being the creator of green life quality. To the extent that businesses attach importance to the provision of green products and services, it will help consumers to become more sensitive to the environment” clarifies the concept.