Comparative Research On Green Marketing Essay

The organic food industry has seen a huge spike in growth that is expected to continue into the future due to an increase in consumption. This will provide Whole Foods Market with huge opportunities. In addition, a wave of ethical and responsible consumption has swept across America. Whole Foods’ decision to pursue sustainable activities will certainly give consumers an added incentive to purchase its organic products.

Whole Foods is a retailer that specializes in organic foods and it has done an excellent job of determining its target market and how to position itself. Instead of going head to head with large food retailers such as Wal-Mart, Whole Foods has found a niche market that works perfectly for itself. This niche market is one that prides itself on being health conscious and environmentally responsible and Whole Foods has done a great job of positioning itself in the same way through its environmentally safe actions and its use of the local community to stock its stores. However, as Whole Foods grows and expands, a person has to wonder if the company will be able to maintain this same position or will have to make

Today an increasing desire from consumers is to have healthy and organic product offerings. While

Since the 1970s, non-mainstream marketing concepts have started challenging traditional mainstream marketing concepts. For example, traditional marketing strategies resulted in over-exploitation, waste of resources and enterprises ignored environment deterioration. Under such strategies, enterprises only concern profit but ignores harms to consumers’ health and destroys the balance of environment. Because of these, the marketing theoretical circle started a serious discussion on how to balance the relationship of business operation and environment protection. Many influential marketing theories were raised.

Although organic products represent just about 2% of the total food and beverage sales in the US, the market is growing approximately 20% annually. More consumers are preferring natural, fat-free and healthy food products. Food items containing trans-fat are losing market share to low calorie, low fat, natural and organic products. Increasing customer preference for organic foods is likely to impact the company’s sales, given its leading market position in the organic grocery segment.

Whole foods has become such a known household name in being the go to for organic products, but times have changed and the competition has grown. I will be analyzing Whole food methods and reasoning to how they became the giant they are today and how they plan on staying ahead of the game. Using the SWOT analysis I first reviewed all of their strengths as a company. The advantages that Whole foods has is that they carry such a large variety of organic food and also their own independent brands. They also have exclusive products that only Whole foods can carry. “Cultivating new brands and exclusive products has become even more important to Whole Foods as mainstream retailers have expanded natural-food offerings” (Gasparro and Josephs 2015). Whole Foods has positioned itself to be the key place to get your organic products, not only food but also beauty, cleaning and other products. They are also a great place to get your foot in the door, “Whole Foods may not dominate specialty-foods retailing the way it once did, but for startups targeting Americans ' growing hunger for natural and organic fare, it remains the ultimate gatekeeper” (Gasparro and Josephs 2015). Others see Whole Foods as the go to for a healthy lifestyle, it has the appeal to the new generation of living a cleaner life. They also always have the latest and greatest when it comes to organic everything.

Nowadays, people are more concern about the healthy lifestyles as well as the environmental sustainability. “If people believe that the food is healthier and they are doing something good for themselves, they are willing to invest a bit more, particularly as they get older” – as Hollie Shaw said. It can be seen that the market for organic and natural foods is a potential market: Organic foods and beverages were available in nearly every food category in 2014 and were available in over 90 percent of U.S. retail food stores (is used to be 75% in 2008). Food labeled “organic” accounted for about $35 billion across North America in

SmartMart is a grocery store that has found its core differentiation in providing organic food to its customers. Due to changes in the market environment, SmartMart has had to rethink its strategies and has identified three scenarios. The first is the store size conundrum due to the recent arrival of low-cost competitors such as Big-Box Mart and new market entrants such as Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). The management has arrived at three strategies to address the problem, namely expand to Big-Box Mart scale, become a niche player or stick to the current store concept. The second scenario is tapping the biofuel opportunity for which three strategies have been identified, namely alliance, acquisition and organic growth. The third scenario is pursuing Organics 2.0 for which three strategies were identified, namely improving the supply chain to increase standards, to distribute high yield seeds to farmers and to work with government agencies and FDA to acquire a label for Organics 2.0.

These factors represent the culture of the society in which the organization operates with in. Change in social values towards healthy livings has adjusted purchasing behaviour and now people are more focusing towards organic produce. For this reason organic domestic retail sales have increased by more than 50% in the last two years from 623 million to 947 million (Keith, 2012). Availability and distribution of this healthy food have increase rapidly. Woolworths, Coles and Aldi all over Australia stock a range of private label goods.

It is observed that Whole Foods Market is correlated with sustainable-led marketing strategies (Martin, Diane, and John Schouten, 2012). It is assumed that when sustainable products escape the market niche, the size of the Whole Foods Market is less important thus serves as a driver towards sustainable-led marketing. It is thus concluded that sustainability is reasonable if the structure of Whole Foods Market companies is borne in mind

The organic food market in the US has reached new heights, with retail sales in 2010 totaling $26.6 billion; this represents a significant increase from $6.1 billion just ten years earlier (Dimitri, 2012). Organic production includes food that is grown without pesticides, chemicals, growth hormones, or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Consumers, once buying mainly organic fruits and vegetables, have recently indicated a strong interest in a wide range of organic products, such as milk, eggs, packaged products, and other manufactured goods.

The food industry is every changing, more than half of the foods on our shelves did not exist 60 years ago. The main supple of food that comes from our country is factory farmed. The smaller more tradition farms have struggled to survive against major food corporations, but they hang onto traditional farming practices that have higher standards for the health and the environment of its livestock. Driving down the road, on nearly every corner of America's main streets is at least one fast food chain store. Enticing the American people to eat unhealthy chemical laced food. As a young mother pushes her grocery chart down an aisle, she picks up a box of chocolate chip cookies. Turning the box around to read the label, she is shocked to see over 30 ingredients along with artificial flavors, food dye and preservatives. Looking at our society as a whole, we see the rising number of obesity and along other diseases and illnesses. The American people are lead to believe various food groups are healthy while others are not. Every year a new, and exciting diet is introduced, promising real changes for a healthier lifestyle. The greatest impact on our health is what we choose to put into our bodies every day. For the health of our nation, and its environment the focus on growing the organic food industry is essential to healing our bodies and land.

Today industry analysts define the organic food market as the most vigorous and quickly growing part of the global food industry. Therefore, I recommend to expand the store concept to compete with the big-box stores since organic food industry is rapidly developing and even stores like big-Mart are offering organics at a low-cost to compete with big players like Smart-Mart. There is an enormous prospect for Smart-Mart to compete in this area since 50% of development in the consumption of organics is pushed by the presenting of organics at low-cost

A substantially growth of organic food industry globally has become one of the evidence proving that people emphasize more in eating well, sanely, healthfully and even ethically nowadays (Bittman, 2009).An estimation of US$ 47.2 billion is expected to grow in the international organic food market within 5 years from 2010 to 2015 (Transparency Market Research, 2014). Consumers are willing to pay more for organic, environmentally-friendly or natural products even during recession (Cummings, 2008). Demand for organic products are gradually increase every year, thereby this report is to analyze the market of China precisely in overall environmental aspects and outline some marketing implications the company will apply if it exports organic products into China.

Identify new metrics which are cost effective while retaining existing ones and seek approval from senior management for redesigning the strategy.