Sustainable Packaging in an Environmental Marketing Strategy: The Case of Apple

The debate about the relationship between companies and ecology is becoming central in marketing studies, in particular considering the branch of Green marketing, also named Environmental marketing (Prakash, 2002) that, in this context, can be concretised in different ways, involving all the so called four Ps. From this point of view, considering the ‘product’ variable, it could be interesting to explore the way companies try to make their packaging ‘greener’ and communicate it in a marketing perspective. Because of packaging’s environmental related issues (Marsh and Bugusu, 2007) some companies implement some actions in order to make their product eco-friendly, also in terms of material eco-efficiency, energy efficiency, but also applying green criteria to the entire supply chain (Albino et al., 2009), from the phase relative to raw materials to waste management (Nordin and Selke, 2010). In order to highlight the importance of a sustainable packaging in a more general environmental marketing strategy, the authors have analysed the case of Apple, the world leading IT and consumer electronics multinational company.