Development of Marketing Strategy of a Green Brand by Russian Companies

Research Plan

Working title

The preliminary working title of my Master’s thesis is “Development of marketing strategy of a green brand by Russian companies: the case of LavkaLavka”. (The company in the title may be subject to change; for more on this please see Research Methods.)

The title reflects the organizational level of analysis: the expected implications of the thesis are supposed to benefit companies, with the research based on the processing of consumer data. (For more information see Expected Findings).

Introduction

‘Green’ or ‘sustainable’ products are not a novelty for customers: companies started to position what they sell as something “organic” or “not harmful for the environment” quite a long time ago, but the trend of ‘going green’ has become universal only in recent years. People seem to start care about what they consume and the marketers quickly adopted the tendency by promoting values and benefits that would have little or no impact on sales 20 or 30 years ago. If your product is not genetically modified, that’s great; if your production processes are sustainable (for instance, do not contribute a lot to the global warming), that’s great, too. But what if a company claims too much? Will customers buy your product when any possible aspect of it is claimed to be “green”? There is still no consensus on how good is good enough when it comes to a green product or a company making green marketing claims, and sometimes marketers even choose not to promote green qualities of their products; that’s why some experts note the slowed growth of the green market in the global scope.

However, the market of green products in Russia is only developing. Just as with other marketing trends, the green marketing emerged in our country with a significant delay, and some say that the actual rise of demand for organic or sustainable products is still to come. In addition, virtually no literature on the topic of green marketing is being published in the Russian...