Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to discuss the need for appropriate green marketing communication strategies to close the gap between consumers’ strong environmental concerns and weak engagement in sustainable behaviors. In doing so, our overarching goal is to provide new direction for creating targeted marketing communication strategies that will more effectively motivate consumer purchasing of green products and services.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors use a survey approach to collect data and regression analysis to test our hypotheses.
Findings
The findings suggest that demographic variables (gender, ethnicity and age) as well as concern for waste, concern for health and concern for environmental technology influence five different categories of sustainable behaviors.
Research limitations/implications
The results suggest that future studies should consider multiple dimensions of environmental concern because each dimension has a different impact on sustainable behaviors.
Practical implications
The findings contribute to the continued development of a green consumer profile and highlight the need for marketers to carefully select appropriate dimensions of environmental concern to emphasize in their communication strategies. Results also reinforce the need to consider demographics in targeted communications.
Originality/value
This study considers the impact of different dimensions of environmental concern and demographic variables on different types of sustainable behaviors.
Undergraduate sales education is somewhat unique in that it prepares students for a career which functions mostly outside of traditional corporate management structures. Concurrently, the demand for well-qualified salespeople has intensified partly due to high turnover. This article contends that there may be a disconnection between student expectations of a sales job when they leave school and what they actually experience on the job. Using salesforce socialization as a theoretical foundation, this study compares students' versus salespeople's perceptions of sales jobs in terms of realism and congruence with outcome and behavior-based job performance indicators as well as perceived ethical control. When considering job performance and ethics, the results show that students have a highly idealistic perception of sales when compared to those in the actual field of sales. For marketing educators it is imperative that efforts are focused on helping students form more realistic expectations for a sales career. Such efforts and suggestions are provided in the implications.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.