Environmental marketing strategy effects on market-based assets

Abstract

Worsening environmental problems have prompted firms to integrate ecological values and ideals into their management processes and marketing strategies as part of developing sustainable models of business excellence. This leads to the question: Does it really pay to integrate sustainability into business processes? If so, how does it pay? By employing the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm  and market-based assets, this study empirically examines the effect of environmental marketing strategy on market-based assets and the moderating effect of strategic proactivity on the above relationships. This study focuses on two important dimensions of market-based assets: relational assets and intellectual assets. By using survey data collected from chief executive officers of publicly listed firms in China, this study finds that an environmental marketing strategy contributes to the increase in relational and intellectual market-based assets, which in turn contributes to better firm performance. Strategic proactivity positively moderates the effect of the environmental marketing strategy on relational market-based assets.

Keywords:

• environmental marketing strategy
• market-based asset
• resource-based view
• strategic proactivity
• firm performance

Acknowledgement

The authors acknowledge the financial support provided by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71072126; 71102009) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 12JNYH005).