Sustainable Development Challenges and the Position of Romanian Enterprises Towards Green Marketing

Abstract

The trend of marketing strategies indicates that practitioners make great efforts in order to consider the challenges of sustainable development. Besides the green marketing and sustainable consumption areas we can already talk about a sustainable marketing mix for companies. The efforts are huge especially for the SME, mainly for marketing communication policies. Even new marketing measures have been developed, such as “consumer’s affinity”, strongly connected with the sustainable development concept (it measures consumers’ long term loyalty). New steps in marketing communication have been made: green communication policies (virtual), social responsibility campaigns, the division between material consumption and perceived value, brand contribution to the sustainable development. We wanted to investigate the situation of these trends for Romanian companies – both large and SME – from the NE region. We made an attempt to analyze the perceptions of the companies towards three types of marketing: green marketing (sustainable products), social marketing (education for a sustainable behavior) and responsible marketing (regulations for avoiding marketing activities’ negative collateral effects). The study is based on a survey of 108 managers from companies situated in the NE region of Romania and partial descriptive results of their perceptions are presented in this paper.