**2. Literature Review**

The intense interest in the problems of green marketing with a focus on clean technology and environmental problems started in the late 1980s and early 1990s [6]. At that time, green marketing was conceptualized as a combination of organizational activities to promote causes of environmental issues and suggest solutions to their counteraction, prevention, and elimination [27]. Although these ideas remain integral to the current conceptualization of green marketing, the concept has become considerably crystallized and enriched over time. Based on previous research [28], we characterize green marketing as the organization's participation in strategic, tactical, and operational marketing activities and processes that have a holistic objective of creating, communicating, and delivering products with minimal environmental impact. Therefore, we center our scale development on this definition.

The literature review on green marketing reveals some instruments developed to measure marketers' perceptions of green marketing initiatives (Table 1). Among these measures are the green marketing audit [7], the green marketing strategy scale [29], etc. Green marketing audit [7] involves the evaluation of mission/goals, global green competence, stakeholders' requirements and green marketing activities. The green marketing strategy scale [29] measures two types of green marketing: process-oriented and market-oriented. Although the scales proposed in the literature present a significant theoretical contribution, some have drawbacks that could become an obstacle to an accurate assessment of green marketing.


**Table 1.** Description of instruments for the measurement of green marketing.

We point out that some scales measuring green marketing were not proven to be valid measures as scholars failed to evaluate their construct, content and discriminant validity [7,20,26]. Some of them were content validated, but construct validation was missing [29,32]. Therefore, it is not clear whether the scales measure green marketing as they are supposed to. To the best of our knowledge, only one green marketing orientation measure developed by Papadas et al. [21] has undergone the diligent scale development process through 4 studies. Currently, the scale is one of the most comprehensive measures of green marketing. It is a 21-item questionnaire that comprises three subscales: strategic green marketing, tactical green marketing, and internal green marketing. Although this scale was shown to be a valid and reliable measure of green marketing orientation, the conceptualization chosen that involves a mix of three unequal components raises some issues. Strategic and tactical activities may contribute to external and internal marketing, while both external and internal marketing may feature strategic and tactical activities and operational activities. Regarding the limitations mentioned above, developing a comprehensive scale for assessing green marketing is warranted. This scale would benefit as an effective tool for assessing dominant strengths and weaknesses in organizational settings.

Although the presented instruments for evaluating green marketing (Table 1) are based on different theoretical models, they have several similar constructs. A construct common to several measures is strategic green marketing [21,22,25,26,33,34]. Strategic green marketing has been investigated using different labels such as enviropreneurial marketing [21], strategic environmental focus [22]. In one study, Mukonza and Swarts [33] found that

green marketing at the strategic level positively affects the corporate image and business performance. D'Souza et al. [30] suggest that green marketing initiatives at the strategic level positively influence the greening of organizations' products, processes, and overall behavior. These initiatives cover green environmental processes, green supplier selection, green research and development, and green resources. According Fraj et al. [29], strategic green marketing refers to transformations of products and processes that aim to improve environmental performance. Such transformations require considerable investments and support from other members of the supply chain. In addition to strategic green marketing measures, green marketing assesses tactical issues [21,29]. Several lines of research on tactical green marketing have shown that it is focused on short-term decisions related to product design, pricing, communications, etc. [2,21,29]. According to Amoako et al. [2], such decisions should clearly emphasize the ideas of sustainable development. Along with the effects of strategic and tactical green marketing, the perception of marketing activities at the operational level is also important [29].

Usually, green marketing studies concentrate on the external dimension of green marketing [6,20,22,26,32], i.e., external green marketing at the strategic, tactical or operational level that aims to reach customers, government institutions, competitors, etc. However, green marketing as a construct consists of multiple activities and should also be geared towards internal audiences [4,7,21,30]. Internal green marketing involves promoting environmental awareness within the organizational setting, employee training, and environmental leadership [21].

The identified structure of green marketing guided our efforts to develop a measurement scale. We elected to include six dimensions of green marketing orientation: (1) external green marketing at a strategic level, (2) external green marketing at a tactical level, (3) external green marketing at an operational level, (4) internal green marketing at a strategic level, (5) internal green marketing at a tactical level, (6) internal green marketing at an operational level. Although these dimensions are common in the literature on marketing [21,22,25,26,29,33,34], their combination into a single measure of green marketing orientation is unique, comprehensive and omnibus. Therefore, the coherence of six dimensions can be utilized as a yardstick for evaluating green marketing. Simultaneous evaluation of external and internal green marketing facets is essential for the complete description of the situation and increased accuracy of the evaluation leading to superior marketing decisions.
