Green marketing philosophy: a study of Spanish firms with ecolabels

The current work attempts to highlight the importance of there being a true corporate commitment towards protecting the environment behind any green communication – i.e., that ecological awareness should be one of the values determining organizational culture. This implies that green marketing should be understood not solely as an activity, but also as a philosophy. In the first part of the article, we discuss the difficulty in measuring the environmental culture of a firm and we propose a series of indicators for this purpose. In the second part, we apply these indicators to the Spanish industrial firms that have at least one ecolabelled product, with a view to deciding whether ecolabels are used as simple sales pitch or, in contrast, there really exists a company behind them with a true environmental culture. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment.