Sustainable environmental performance: The mediating role of green reputation in the choice of green marketing or green demarketing

Growing concern for sustainability of the natural environment is rapidly transforming the competitive landscape and forcing firms to implement traditional green marketing, along with less conventional green demarketing. As green marketing strategies become increasingly important, firms need to adhere to environmental performance evaluation. In contrast, rather than encouraging greener consumption, green demarketing calls for decreased consumption overall. Despite its potential impact, comparative research on these two marketing strategies is limited. Moreover, green reputation is a decisive resource that is related to marketing strategy and environmental performance. Previous empirical research, however, has largely neglected the role of green reputation on marketing strategy for environmental performance relationships. A theoretical framework is used to identify a gap in the environmental management literature and future research directions, based on the respective effects of green marketing and green demarketing of a firm's environmental performance, and the mediating effect of green reputation to explain these relationships. Data was collected through a questionnaire‐based survey including 217 companies from manufacturing and service industry sectors in Taiwan. Structural equation model to examine hypotheses reveals that green marketing, green demarketing, and green reputation directly affect environmental performance. Further analysis finds that green reputation fully mediates the green marketing–environmental performance link and partially mediates the green demarketing–environmental performance link. This work is the first to empirically compare the effects of green marketing and green demarketing on environmental performance through green reputation.