Investigating the effects of green marketing on development of brand fascination

Article history: Received July 28, 2013 Accepted March 24 2014 Available online March 26 2014 This paper investigates the effects of different green marketing on brand fascination for a south Korean electronic producer, Samsung. The proposed study designs two questionnaires, one for measuring the effects of green marketing and the other for brand fascination in Likert scale. Cronbach alphas for green marketing and brand fascination are calculated as 0.72 and 0.79, respectively. The study has been implemented among 385 regular customers of Samsung’s electronic devices. Using Spearman correlation ratio as well as stepwise regression analysis, the study has concluded that two components of green marketing including green product and green promotion influence positively on brand fascination, positively. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
The growing concern with environmental degradation has recently favored a new segment of consumers called the green consumers (Robin & Reidenbach, 1987;Thomson et al., 2005;Ottman et al., 2006;Whan Park et al., 2010).These kinds of consumers are the ones who prevent products, which endanger health, create significant damage to the environment during production, apply or disposal, cause unnecessary waste, and consume materials derived from threatened species or environments.Many business owners have recognized the relative importance of marketing in detecting responses to these consumers' "environmental needs" and the green marketing has started to become a prominent field of investigation.do Paço and Raposo ( 2008) performed an investigation on various variables associated with the environmental characteristics.They provided a group of an extensive list of variables into a set of relevant dimensions, which could be beneficial to profile the green consumer.Maignan and Ferrell (2004) introduced a framework of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which focuses the role and potential contribution of the marketing discipline.The model first described CSR initiatives as the actions undertaken to demonstrate conformity to both organizational and stakeholder norms.They also discussed the managerial processes required to monitor, meet, and even exceed, stakeholder norms.Luo and Bhattacharya (2006) developed and examined a conceptual framework, which forecast whether or not customer satisfaction could partially mediate the relationship between CSR and firm market value.They reported that in firms with low innovativeness capability, CSR actually influences negatively customer satisfaction levels and, through the lowered satisfaction, harms market value.Bronn and Vrioni (2001) discussed various social responsibilities associated with firms and offered green marketing as an alternative strategy for taking care of environment.Chen (2010) proposed four novel constructs including green brand image, green trust, green satisfaction and green brand equity, and investigated the positive relationships between green brand equity and its three drivers including green brand image, green trust and green satisfaction.Peattie and Crane (2005) investigated different elements of green marketing theory and practice by applying the logic of the classic paper from 1985 "Has marketing failed, or was it never really tried" of seeking to identify "false marketing" hampered progress.They identified five kinds of misconceived green marketing including green spinning, green selling, green harvesting, compliance marketing, etc.

The proposed study
This paper investigates the effects of four green factors of green supply chain on brand fascination.The proposed study uses two questionnaires, one for measuring the effects of green marketing and the other for brand fascination in Likert scale.The proposed study considers the following four hypotheses, 1. Green product influences on brand fascination, positively.2. Green price influences on brand fascination, positively.3. Green promotion influences on brand fascination, positively.4. Green distribution influences on brand fascination, positively.
Fig. 1 shows the structure of the proposed study as follows,

Green price
Brand fascination Green promotion

Fig. 1. The proposed study
The study has been implemented among some regular customers of Samsung's electronic devices.The sample size is calculated as follows, where N is the sample size, and e=0.05, the number of sample size is calculated as N= 385.We have distributed the questionnaires among some participants and Fig. 2 shows personal charactersitcs of the participants.Cronbach alphas for green marketing and brand fascination are calculated as 0.72 and 0.79, respectively.

Gender
Years of education Age Fig.

Personal characteristics of the participants
As we can observe from the results of Fig. 2, most participants had some university background.In addition, the survey indicates that most people who took part in our investigation were middle aged people.The implementation of Kolmogorov-Smirnove test has indicated the data were not normally distributed.Therefore, we apply Spearman correlation ratio as well as Stepwise regression test to verify the hypotheses of the survey.

The results
In this section, we present details of our results on testing four hypotheses of the survey.Table 1 shows details of the results of Spearman correlation ratio on testing the effects of four green marketing on brand fascination.The results of Table 1 clearly show that there were positive and meaningful relationship between four components of green marketing and brand fascination when the level of significance is one percent.The highest correlation is between Green product and brand fascination (r = 0.481, Sig.=0.003) followed by the relationship between Green distribution and brand fascination (r = 0.435, Sig.= 0.017), between Green promotion and brand fascination (r = 0.362, Sig.= 0.000) and between Green price and brand fascination (r = 0.214, Sig.= 0.000).We have also performed stepwise regression analysis and Table 2 shows the results of the survey.

Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented a study to determine the impacts of green management on green fascination on South Korean producer of electronic devices, Samsung.The study has distributed two questionnaires among some randomly selected people and using Spearman correlation ratios as well as stepwise regression analysis, the study has determined that two green marketing figures including green product and green promotion influence positively on brand fascination (α = 0.05).The results of this study are consistent with findings of do Paço and Raposo (2008), Peattie & Crane (2005) and Ottman et al. (2006).

Table 1
The results of testing the impact of green marketing on brand fascination based on Spearman As we can observe from the results of Table2, two green marketing components including green product and green promotion influence positively on brand fascination (α = 0.05).