The term "green" or "natural" showcasing refers to activities designed to develop and use trades anticipated to meet human necessities or demands. This suggests that businesses are engaging in practices that significantly influence the climate, such as reducing waste, using eco-friendly power sources for production operations, and encouraging sensible use habits among their customers. Furthermore, these efforts should be directed toward long-term sustainability objectives rather than immediate financial rewards (Polonsky, 1995). The selling and promotion of environmentally friendly goods and services that are free of hazardous chemicals and recyclable are not the focus of green marketing. It is a much broader term that includes product identification, modification, advancement in the production process or change in the manufacturing process, promotion, and distribution.
Green marketing is often referred to as ecological marketing and environmental marketing (Polonsky, 1994), as well as sustainable marketing (Gordon et al., 2011). The term "sustainable marketing" typically refers to "green marketing," but due to the political, financial, and mechanical constraints that organizations and states are considering, sustainability as an idea can be contested, open to various interpretations, and challenging to translate into meaningful activities (Baker, 2012). Sustainable marketing is a concept that focuses on creating and maintaining long-term relationships with customers, the natural environment, and society. It involves developing strategies to ensure sustainable growth for businesses while also protecting the environment from harm. Sustainable marketing includes activities such as reducing waste production, using renewable resources instead of non-renewable ones when possible, promoting eco-friendly products or services in order to reduce the environmental impact caused by the consumption habits of consumers, etc. On the other side, companies can use their business practices and policies towards achieving sustainability goals that are beneficial both economically (for example, through cost savings) but also socially (by improving quality of life).
Sustainability refers to the capacity to meet current needs without jeopardizing the potential of future generations to fulfill their desires. Sustainable marketing, often known as green marketing or ethical marketing, is a corporate strategy that takes into account social and environmental considerations when determining the goods and services to offer. It entails developing plans for marketing products and services in ways that are both ethical and socially responsible. Long-term sustainability is the aim of sustainable marketing, which takes into account how the decisions we make now will affect people's lives tomorrow (Pearson & Henryks, n.d.). Green marketing is a marketing strategy that emphasizes the promotion of ecologically friendly products and services. It involves creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings with customers in ways that benefit both the customer as well as society at large by reducing environmental impacts. Green marketing includes other tasks like product design changes to reduce resource consumption or waste generation, packaging modifications for reduced material use, pricing strategies designed to encourage more sustainable consumer behavior, and communication campaigns aimed at raising awareness about sustainability issues among consumers (Peattie & Crane, 2005).
Green marketing has gained recognition among marketers and has recently sparked greater interest from consumers and various nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Customers are becoming more conscious of nature conservation efforts as well as ethical and sensible product assembly and promotion (Khattak, 2019). To make judgments on product-market strategies and marketing environment strategies that might lessen the environmental effect of producing and selling products, businesses must have the support of top management (Saleem et al., 2020). The significance and expansion of research on green marketing necessitate a thorough evaluation of the topic from both the viewpoints of quality and quantity. The assessment of qualitative and quantitative research may be done in many different ways. To assess the advancement that may be used to gauge the development made in this area of discipline distribution patterns, bibliometric analysis was used (Durisin et al., 2010). The bibliometric analysis provides a comprehensive overview to evaluate the previous research that can be used to gain meaningful, practical implications for future research (Weisheipl, 1981). Because bibliometric analysis is widely applicable across platforms and is regarded as the finest tool for analysing previously published work, this study intends to incorporate the important themes of previously published work in the field of green marketing in the Scopus database from 1990 to 2022 (X. Wang et al., 2020). The trend of bibliometrics analysis has been increasing day by day and it is being apply in many filed to analyse the already published works such as patent mining (Madani & Weber, 2016), forecasting emerging technologies (Daim et al., 2006), medicine (Kokol et al., 2021), climate change (Sharifi et al., 2021), economic development (Luo et al., 2022), scholarly communication (Borgman, 2016). Therefore, the goal of the current study is to comprehend how green marketing has changed over the past three decades and to establish a solid foundation for future transdisciplinary research.
The paper presents a clear outline of the study objectives, followed by a comprehensive review of previous research conducted in the field of green marketing. Furthermore, a theoretical framework has been developed based on an extensive literature review. Furthermore, in the subsequent phase of this study, the procedure employed to ensure the authenticity of this research is outlined. This encompasses identifying the research gap in the current literature, followed by elucidating the research methodology and sources used for data collection. Additionally, the process of screening relevant documents and selecting appropriate tools for conducting this bibliometric analysis is described.
Additionally, the subsequent section focuses on the analysis of data and the resulting discoveries. This includes the annual publishing pattern of articles on green marketing, three field plots, referenced journals, authors with impact factors, relevant affiliations, trending topics, a map showing the occurrence of keywords, a collaboration between co-authors from different countries, and a thematic map. The following section concludes with the results, limitations, and future research opportunities in the field of green marketing.