Green marketing strategies in the dairy sector: Consumer‐stated preferences for carbon footprint labels

• Date: 01 July 2019
• Author: Maurizio Canavari,Silvia Coderoni
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/jsc.2264
• Published date: 01 July 2019

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Green marketing strategies in the dairy sector: Consumer-

stated preferences for carbon footprint labels*

Maurizio Canavari

1

| Silvia Coderoni

2

1

Department of Agricultural and Food

Sciences, Alma Mater Studiorum-Università di

Bologna, Bologna, Italy

2

Department of Economics and Social

Sciences, Università Politecnica delle Marche,

Ancona, Italy

Correspondence

Silvia Coderoni, Department of Economics and

Social Sciences, Università Politecnica delle

Marche, Piazzale Martelli, 8, 60121 Ancona,

Italy.

Email: s.coderoni@univpm.it

Abstract

Italian consumers’serveyed revealed a generally positive willingness to pay for milk

labeled for lower carbon footprint. Green marketing and related sustainable labels

are important devices to convey information to consumers about more sustainable

business models. Italian consumers' willingness to pay for milk with lower carbon

footprint analyzed through a pilot survey is positive and significant. Consumers' will-

ingness to pay also depends on the importance consumers assign to climate change,

price sensitivity, as well as on income.

1|INTRODUCTION

Responsible consumption and production are one of the 17 sustain-

able development goals of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Develop-

ment of the United Nations (2015), which states that “It's in

businesses' interest to find new solutions that enable sustainable con-

sumption and production patterns.”Indeed, analyzing the value chain

of a product and identifying hot spots of the life cycle where interven-

tions have a great potential to reduce environmental impacts often

lead to economic advantages (Coderoni, Valli, & Canavari, 2015).

In Europe, the EU Sustainable Development Strategy sets out the

aim of promoting sustainable consumption and production patterns.

Its main objectives are decoupling economic growth from environ-

mental degradation, addressing social and economic development

within the carrying capacity of ecosystems. The key of this challenging

process is the alignment between the behavior of producers and con-

sumers: on one side, producers should always aim to improve their

business performance by introducing more sustainable business

models, on the other side, consumers should be conscious of the con-

sequences of their consumption choices and adapt their behavior

accordingly. For this reason, it is fundamental that consumers have

access to information about the environmental sustainability of pro-

duction processes. Therefore, businesses willing to actively target

consumers who are interested in more sustainable products should

implement appropriate green marketing strategies.

The idea of green marketing emerged in the 1980s, and over the

years, a large body of literature highlighted the growing environmental

awareness and consumers' interest in green products or their willing-

ness to pay (WTP) for more sustainable products (Mintel, 1991;

Worcester, 1993).

The most common instruments to support changes in consump-

tion patterns are the so-called “sustainable labels,”that is, types of

labels that are designed to convey to the consumer concepts related

to sustainability, considering the environmental, ethical, and social

elements involved (Padel, Zander, & Gössinger, 2010; Vermeir &

Verbeke, 2006; Zander & Hamm, 2010).

Sustainable labels, for instance, can help orienting the consumer

toward buying more greenhouse gases (GHG) saving products and

therefore mitigating their contribution to global warming. To this

extent, they are referred to as “carbon footprint”(CF) labels, as they

indicate the grams of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO

2e

)

1

emitted into

the atmosphere along all the life cycle of a product or service, which

comprises production, transport, transformation, distribution, and pur-

chase (Kohnle, 2013).

Globally, agriculture is responsible for 24% of emissions in 2010

(IPCC, 2014) and therefore climate change mitigation is one of the

key environmental goals of agricultural production worldwide.

At European level, climate action is one of the main priorities of

the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), which gives incentives to

farmers to adopt GHG mitigation options. However, according to

*JEL classification codes: D12, Q54, Q01, Q18.

1

CO

2e

is a term that describes different greenhouse gases in a common unit. A quantity of

non-CO

2

GHG can be expressed as CO

2e

by multiplying the amount of the GHG by its global

warming potential (GWP).

DOI: 10.1002/jsc.2264

Strategic Change. 2019;28:233–240. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jsc © 2019 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 233