The effect of green marketing strategies. The market response to environmental announcements

Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Business economics - Offline Marketing and Online Marketing, grade: 16/20, Leuven Catholic University, language: English, abstract: As the environment becomes an increasingly important concern for companies, this paper seeks to answer the question ¿¿When does it pay to be green?¿¿. Event study methodology is used to investigate the stock returns following environmental Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) announcements. This study shows that environmental CSR announcements have a positive effect on shareholder value. Our theory posits that different green marketing strategies have a differential effect on shareholder value.

The results of this study provide indication that an announcement of a green partnership creates more positive stock returns than an announcement of greening the organisation and that an announcement of a green product creates the least positive stock returns for the company. The product type (high-involvement product vs. low-involvement product) does not change these observations. The preferred green marketing strategy remains the announcement of a green partnership. At the end, the theoretical and managerial implications of these results and future research avenues are presented.