International Journal of Management and Social Sciences Research (IJMSSR) ISSN: 2319-4421 Volume 2, No. 7, July 2013 i-Xplore International Research Journal Consortium www.irjcjournals.org 49 A Study of Evolution and Practice of Green Marketing by Various Companies in India Prof. Gurmeet Singh H, (B.Com, MBA-Fin, M.Phil, LL.B and Ph.D Pursuing ), N.R. Institute of Business Management, Gujarat Technological University, Ahmedabad. ABSTRACT Generally marketers don’t talk about ethics too much. Marketers can often drive human desires and behaviors, getting people to buy things that they may or may not need, making them feel better or worse about them in the process. Marketing being an inevitable function of an organization it should ideally hold the balance between economic and social goals. Most of us would agree that it is ethics in practice that makes sense; just having it carefully drafted and redrafted in books may not serve the purpose. Ethical issues in marketing are an important consideration for a modern business. Marketing is the heart of all businesses and all other functions depend upon the same for keeping the business moving. It is one business function that interacts the most with markets, in fact markets are meant to sell and they exist only when they sell. So it is very important to analyze the practice of ethics in marketing area by various companies. In this research paper we have analyzed that how ethics is evolved over the few years. To cater with problems of principles, ethics & moral dilemmas, marketing needs to have a broader perspective to serve the society & environment which is being executed by various companies by embracing the new concept of “Green Marketing” Keywords: Green Marketing, Ethics, Environment, Social goals INTRODUCTION OF GREEN MARKETING Unfortunately, a majority of people believe that green marketing refers solely to the promotion or advertising of products with environmental characteristics. Terms like Phosphate Free, Recyclable, Refillable, Ozone Friendly, and Environmentally Friendly are some of the things consumers most often associate with green marketing. While these terms are green marketing claims, in general green marketing is a much broader concept, one that can be applied to consumer goods, industrial goods and even services. For example, around the world there are resorts that are beginning to promote themselves as "ecotourist" facilities, i.e., facilities that "specialize" in experiencing nature or operating in a fashion that minimizes their environmental impact [May 1991, Ingram and Durst 1989, Troumbis 1991]. Thus green marketing incorporates a broad range of activities, including product modification, changes to the production process, packaging changes, as well as modifying advertising. Yet defining green marketing is not a simple task. The American Marketing Association (AMA) held the first workshop on "Ecological Marketing" in 1975. The proceedings of this workshop resulted in one of the first books on green marketing entitled "Ecological Marketing" [Henion and Kinnear 1976a]. Since that time a number of other books on the topic have been published [Charter 1992, Coddington 1993, Ottman 1993]. The AMA workshop attempted to bring together academics, practitioners, and public policy makers to examine marketing's impact on the natural environment. At this workshop ecological marketing was defined as: the study of the positive and negative aspects of marketing activities on pollution, energy depletion and nonenergy resource depletion. [Henion and Kinnear 1976b, 1]. This early definition has three key components, 1) it is a subset of the overall marketing activity; 2) it examines both the positive and negative activities; and 3) a narrow range of environmental issues are examined. The following definition is much broader than those of other researchers and it encompasses all major components of other definitions. “Green or Environmental Marketing consists of all activities designed to generate and facilitate any exchanges intended to satisfy human needs or wants, such that the satisfaction of these needs and wants occurs, with minimal detrimental impact on the natural environment. [Polonsky 1994b, 2] BENEFITS OF GREEN MARKETING Air pollution damage to people, crops and wildlife in US each year creating loss of tens of billions of dollars. "More than 12 other studies in the US, Brazil, Europe, Mexico, South Korea and Taiwan have established links between air pollutants and low birth weight premature birth still birth and infant death". As resources are limited and human wants are unlimited, it is important for the marketers to utilize the resources efficiently without waste as well as to achieve the organization's objective. So green marketing is inevitable. There is growing interest among