Special Report
Green Marketing in Asia
While green marketing has taken the US and Europe by storm, marketers and consumers in Asia show few signs of jumping on the bandwagon...yet. Fadmad japan is the main exception, where eco-friendly slogans are emblazoned on goods ranging from designer clothes and beer cans to gift wrapping in department stores. Just how deep this commitment goes is anyone's guess.
"Garden republic" Singapore might seem the perfect setting for ecological awareness, but citizens are only just waking up to their government's ambitious save-the-environment programmes.
Elsewhere in Asia, environmental problems receive scant attention as both consumers and producers concentrate their energies on attaining the goals of economic development. Tropical rain forests continue to be cut down, waterways and air are befouled and concern for the environment is often dismissed as a luxury for rich countries only.
The ways of the West have spread to Asia, changing age-old, environmentally sound traditions. The supermarket is replacing wet markets; the convenience of canned and bottled products is weaning housewives away from fresh foods bought daily; plastic, glass, tin and polystyrene are wrapped around purchases with blithe disregard for their future as garbage or litter, and plastic bags are supplanting the housewife’s basket in which all purchases once traveled home from the market.
The concepts of convenience and disposability — the very qualities which appeal to evolving consumer markets — have dangerous implications for the environment and its resources.
This cannot go on forever — the issues facing the future of the Earth will not solve themselves. At the very least, as wealth grows in this part of the world, consumers will demand better surroundings in which to enjoy their rising standards of living. Then the pressure will be on marketers to provide buyers with goods produced and presented in a more ecologically friendly way. This trend is already apparent in South Korea and Taiwan where consumer pressure groups are fighting for a cleaner environment.
Marketers may not feel motivated to change until more Asians demand greenness with their purchasing power But those who wish to capture some of the North American, European or Australian markets had better be prepared to make their products meet the standards now being demanded by consumers there.
Source : Asian Advertising & Marketing, September, 1991
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