ABSTRACT

Although demarketing has a history of close to 50 years, it has not lost its unconventionality and otherness. Commercially-intended green demarketing promoting pro-environmental preservation is gaining scholarly attention amid a surge in green marketing activities and the incidences of greenwashing. Companies are constantly under suspicion of not being honest, of masquerading as environmentalists. With a qualitative interpretive approach, we examine in-depth one single non-hypothetical green demarketing case and employ interviews in the field. We systematize a broad spectrum of consumer responses that includes but does not focus on the motives that consumers attribute to companies. A thematic analysis reveals spontaneous responses advocating the topic of the campaign on the category level, as well as how consumers deal with the inherent contradiction of green demarketing that arises from the sender-message combination on the brand level. In addition, we discover that consumers’ environmental concerns in response to green demarketing differ depending on contextual effects.

摘要

尽管去营销已有近50年的历史，但它并没有失去它的标新立异和差异性。在绿色营销活动激增和洗绿事件发生的情况下，旨在促进环境保护的商业化绿色反营销正受到学术界的关注。公司经常被怀疑不诚实，伪装成环保主义者。通过定性解释方法，我们深入研究了一个单一的非假设性绿色反营销案例，并在该领域进行了采访。我们系统化了广泛的消费者反应，包括但不关注消费者归因于公司的动机。主题分析揭示了在类别层面倡导运动主题的自发反应，以及消费者如何处理品牌层面的发信组合所产生的绿色去营销的内在矛盾。此外，我们发现消费者对绿色反营销的环境关注因环境影响而异。