Exploring the effects of green marketing mix on Green Trust in the green cosmetic industry

Abstract

This research thrives to provide a better understanding of the impact of green marketing on green trust in the cosmetic industry through the choice of four tools taken from the marketing mix: availability, efficiency, price and eco-labels. This research also investigates the role of green knowledge in moderating the relationship between those tools and green trust, and its direct effect on green trust. An exploration of the previous literature on the green industry and green marketing was formed beforehand, to have clear background for the research with a focus on green marketing mix, green trust as well as green knowledge. An empirical quantitative study was led from the 21st to the 30th of July gathering 236 usable answers from French consumers in order to ensure generalizability and exploitation of the results.

This research, using factor analysis, correlation analyses, simple and multiple regression analyses, finds that perception of availability, perception of efficiency and perception of eco-labels are positively correlated with green trust. Still, most correlation can mainly be explained by three control variables: gender, frequency of organic cosmetic purchase as well as the extent to which consumers value organic cosmetic purchase, thus balancing the initial conclusions that were drawn about the correlations. Theoretically, these findings bring precisions to the research on the potential drivers of green trust in the organic cosmetic market. Practically, it means that marketers can use those marketing mix tools without worrying to worsen the fragile trust that consumers might have in the green features of organic cosmetics. But more than that: those tools can be incorporated in a global reflection of brands to enhance consumers’ confidence towards the environmental performance of their green products. Still, price perception was not found to be correlated with green trust and comes to balance existing theory on the topic. This could be a sign for companies to focus on providing a fair price instead of appearing rather cheap or expensive. Finally, this research gives the reader insights about the effects of subjective -or perceived- Green Knowledge on Green Trust as they were found to be positively correlated. This study finally reveals that Perceived Green Knowledge does not play a moderating role in the relationship between the marketing mix tools and green trust. Those findings reveal a moderate influence of green knowledge but partly show the place of green knowledge in shaping consumers’ attitudes towards green products, leading to the conclusion that education of consumers is key in the reinforcement of green trust. In a word, this thesis aims to provide marketers with concrete tools as per trust-building strategies for their green cosmetic products.