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Christian Fuentes.

Christian Fuentes

Professor

Christian Fuentes.

Green Materialities: Marketing and the socio-material construction of green products

Author

  • Christian Fuentes

Summary, in English

Green products are becoming part of contemporary consumer cultures and part of everyday life. But how are green products constructed? What kind of green products are constructed? And what happens as these green products are constructed?



The aim of this paper is to contribute a socio-cultural and critical understanding of green marketing by exploring and illustrating how marketing practices work to construct green products as meaningful material-symbolic artefacts in practice.



Departing from an understanding of marketing as practice I analyse how a green outdoor product - a t-shirt - was constructed as green through the marketing practices of the Nordic Nature Shops. Focusing on this retail corporation and examining the practices of trail making, attending and selling, it is suggested that these t-shirts become green through a process of socio-material inscription. Through marketing practices green moral is generated and linked to the t-shirts potentially making them desirable consumption objects to be used in the construction of consumers green identities. However, this process of green making is a difficult accomplishment with ambiguous outcomes. While the tendency to inscribe commercial products with morality can be interpreted as an indication of the development of a more ethically reflective consumer culture, it can also be argued to lead to the commercialization of morality

Department/s

  • Department of Service Studies

Publishing year

2014

Language

English

Pages

105-116

Publication/Series

Business Strategy and the Environment

Volume

23

Issue

2

Document type

Journal article

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Topic

  • Social Sciences Interdisciplinary

Keywords

  • Green marketing
  • practice theory
  • socio-material
  • green consumption: ethnographic method
  • Marketing-as-Practice

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1099-0836