Chapter 4: Conventional companies.

This chapter examines the green marketing initiatives of conventional companies, RetailCo and ManufactureCo. The firms' approach to green marketing was broadly described. Particular reference is made to how these approaches corresponded with notions of social responsibility and societal marketing. In the next section, the observed and reported cultural dynamics of green marketing in the case study companies are set out. Here, attention is focused in the main on RetailCo, mainly because this case offered far deeper and more useful data with which to build up a picture of moral meaning in a conventional firm. This was largely a product of access limitations at ManufactureCo, as well as the lack of any significant environmental programme at the company. The principal intention of this section is to draw out some emergent themes which help to explain how green marketing practices were enacted within the conventional companies, and to assess what implications this might have for understanding moral meaning in marketing. Finally, the main findings of the chapter are summarized and issues of concern for the following chapter are set out. In terms of their principal products and markets, the two companies were clearly in very different positions in relation to green marketing. RetailCo, as a retailer of branded and own-label personal care products, gifts, food products, etc. certainly could not be regarded as operating in a dirty industry, but many areas within its scope of operations could be environmentally controversial.