Promoting Enterprise Sustainability Through Green Marketing Models: a Case Study of Tissue Manufacturing at Chandaria Industries Limited Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract

Enterprise sustainability in manufacturing firms has become one of the pressing issues that the world wants to achieve in the 21st Century. This study aimed at establishing how green marketing can promote enterprise sustainability through four specific objectives: (i) To establish the factors an enterprise should consider when adopting a green marketing model; (ii)To determine green marketing strategies adopted by Chandaria Industries Limited (CIL); (iii) To determine the components of enterprise sustainability that have been achieved in CIL and (iv)To determine the opportunities and challenges faced by CIL when implementing green marketing strategies to promote enterprise sustainability. CIL was selected through purposive sampling while a stratified random sample of 80 respondents comprising of 21 workers, 36 distributors and 23 consumers were stratified according to their position in the chain of distribution before they were randomly selected for the interview. In addition, 3 officials each from government Ministry of Industry, Trade and Cooperatives (Transport Manager), Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (Project Officer) and National Environment Management Authority (NEMA) (Monitoring and Evaluation Manager) also filled the questionnaires. The study used SPSS version 26 to analyze data and generate descriptive statistics as well as perform regression analysis for hypothesis testing. Results show that on a priority scale of 0-5 CIL considered factors such as competitive advantage ( mean of 4.32), environmental protection regulation (mean of 3.59), cost efficiency (mean of 3.7) and consumer behavior (mean of 3.37) when adopting a green marketing model. CIL adopted green marketing strategies like green promotion (mean of 4.35), green product (mean of 3.8), green price (mean of 3.52) and green place (mean of 3.22) to promote their enterprise agenda. In performance terms, CIL tissue manufacturing did significantly well on various components of enterprise sustainability: Economic performance taking the lead with mean of 3.76; Social Performance (3.55); and Environmental Performance (3.37). Despite these achievements CIL can still tap into opportunities like stakeholder partnerships, competitive advantage, corporate social responsibility, environmental responsiveness, government regulation and technology innovation while addressing challenges such as lack of factual information, lack of financial incentives, lack of standardization and poor enforcement of environmental laws to further the green marketing agenda. Test of hypothesis supported the conclusion that green marketing has a statistically significant positive effect on enterprise sustainability .The study recommended CIL broadens their green marketing activities to cover all other production lines besides tissue manufacturing. The government (as regulator) should consider incentives to encourage a culture of resource efficiency among enterprises such as CIL. Finally, more research is needed on how green marketing enables enterprise sustainability in other different sector enterprises such as cooperatives, partnerships for comparison purposes.