Exploring Antecedents of Green Marketing Orientation in Pakistani SMEs: A Exploratory Study

Abstract

In the developing economies such as Pakistan, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are experiencing growing demands on the environment and cannot implement the sustainability concept because of resource limitations, weak institutions, and disjointed supply chains. Although the role of Green Marketing Orientation (GMO) is increasingly becoming important, little is known about how SMEs adopt it in such situations. This paper will be based on the Natural Resource-Based View (NRBV), Institutional Theory and Stakeholder Theory and will examine the antecedent factors of the adoption of GMO in Pakistani SMEs. Semi-structured interviews and 2 focus group discussions that involved 27 SME owners-managers working in various industries were used to collect data that was analyzed with the help of a six-stage thematic analysis by Braun and Clarke. The result shows that adoption of GMO is a configurational interaction between three antecedent groups namely: personal, organizational, and environmental (where corporate social responsibility, stakeholder demands, and government policies lead to the adoption). The research builds on NRBV by demonstrating that SMEs form green capabilities via interrelated and not disjointed drivers in institutional voids. In practice, it raises the importance of specific green finance, sharing platforms, and facilitating the incentives to permit sustainable competitiveness of SMEs in the new markets.