What are the opportunities and challenges for green marketing and could it provide competitive advantage for companies in the Bulgarian market?

Abstract

In Economics, there is supply and demand. If there is demand and supply doesn’t follow it will cause the prices to go up, and if there is supply but no demand the prices will plunge down. In the case of Bulgaria, there is demand but no supply. With environmental issues becoming more and more contemporary, being "green" and caring for the environment has become a part of our everyday life. The European Union and nations around the world, pressed by its societies are making multilateral agreements and passing laws, tightening the grip around companies to confront and be more environmentally cautious. Companies seeing that consumers are in agreement, they naturally see the profit that is to be made. Many big companies are "jumping the gun" and adopting the laws that are sure to follow, green products, green supply chain, green production lines and more. In that way they both confront to the regulations and norms given them by the governments and enter a market niche that can be exploited, as a result consumers look favorably upon those companies. Still, being green doesn’t chase away consumers; it just expands the company market without any negatives on the already existing customers. Even on the contrary, the company’s prestige would go up. Green marketing is one of the levers that the companies use in order to reach their goals of supplying the customers with what they want. In this dissertation I will try to prove that there is place for Green marketing on the Bulgarian market, and that companies will benefit from adopting it. Another goal of this paper is to assess the challenges that Green marketing might face at the Bulgarian market, and how they could be overcome. I am also seeking the comparison between different generations and their view of green products and their usefulness. The paper starts with an introduction and entry of the subject in Chapter I, then it proceeds with Rationale and Background. In that segment I make my point and give my reasons for choosing this subject, mainly my fascination over environmentalism, green policy making and thanks to my MBA education to Green Marketing as well. Then the paper follows with Research Objectives and Questions, here I state the path that it is intended to be followed and the questions that I hope to answer with this work. Of course the end result will provide the final answer. The paper proceeds with Literature Review in Chapter II, here secondary data is used to review the available literature on the subjects and to explore its advantages and disadvantages, with the hope that later on I could link them to my dissertation findings or draw a solution to some of my questions. In Chapter III is the Methodology section, here I clearly state my chosen methods and why I have chosen them: Epistemological and Inductive approaches, Primary and Secondary data, non-probability sampling and in particular the consecutive sampling (Saunders 2003) are going to best fit my needs, since I am trying to generalize on the population. There are some age restrictions, mainly due to the ethical complications that can arise from interviewing through questionnaires, in particular underage people. Gender is of no consequence for my research therefore it will not be explored. The collection of data and safe keeping of the results, Validity and Reliability, followed by sections on Access, Time Horizon, Collection of Data, Questionnaires, Ethics and Limitation. In the Chapter IV, I present the Research Finding and analyze the Results of the primary data and discuss the questions that I had chosen. In the final Chapter V I give my conclusion on the topic and present my recommendations.