*4.1. Characteristics of the Body of the Literature*

The database search led to 612 initial hits in Scopus, 419 in WoS, and 1573 in Business Source Premier. After the first screening procedure for relevance in light of the chosen selection criteria and the elimination of duplicate papers, 254 papers remained in the initial sample. All the documents of the working pool were utterly read. Examining their contents led to a further exclusion of 87 articles and a final sample of 166 studies.

Figure 2 presents the number of sampled papers published every year. The first studies on green marketing and its relationship to customer behavior were published in 1995 (the work of Shrum et al. [25]). The trendline highlights the increasing research output in this field. On average, six articles per year were published during 1995–2022, with the years 2019–2021 being the ones with the highest productivity.

The articles were published in 120 different journals. Table 1 offers an overview of the academic journals that published papers containing the final sample. Sustainability published the most significant number of relevant studies. Marketing Intelligence & Planning, British Food Journal, Business Strategy and Environment, Electronic Green Journal, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Journal of Advertising, Journal of Cleaner Production, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, and Journal of Strategic Marketing are the other popular outlets for the research in green marketing. Such diversity in journal coverage reflects the interdisciplinary nature of green marketing and customer behavior. The broad nature of sources taken into consideration and not relying exclusively on marketing sources increases the credibility of a systematic literature review.

A. Paco and N.M. Suki were the authors who published the highest number of studies in the area of green marketing and customer behavior, with three records each. Fourteen other authors (A.A. Bailey, V. Bathmanathan, AB.C. Castro, Y.S. Chen, Y.R. Chen, D. Jaiswal, L.W. Johnson, A.S. Mishra, T.T. Pham, J. Rajadurai, V. Sethi, K.T. Smithy, M.F. Tiamiyu, and L. Varejeo) published two studies each.


**Table 1.** The number of papers published per journal.

## *4.2. Researched Settings*

The selected papers are not evenly distributed across the continents in terms of researched settings. Most of them cover Asia (62.57%), with some participation from the remaining continents. The dominant position of Asia is undoubtedly related to the rapid growth of overall research activity in this continent since 2000 [26]. The papers' distribution across the continents has shown that 19% of studies were conducted in Europe and 8% in North America.

The research was carried out in 45 countries (Figure 3), distributed as follows: India with 21 studies; Malaysia with 14 studies; the United States of America with 12 studies; Pakistan and Taiwan with 11 studies each; China with ten studies; Indonesia with nine studies; Iran with eight studies; South Korea with seven studies; Vietnam with six studies; Portugal with five studies; Australia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom with four studies each; Ghana, New Zealand, and Romania with three studies each; Brazil, Canada, Netherlands, Slovakia, South Africa, Bangladesh, and Thailand with two studies each; and Algeria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Cambodia, Croatia, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Italy, Kingdom of Bahrain, Malaysia, Mauritius, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, and Austria with one study in each country. Some studies (3.01%) were conducted in more than one country.

Studies on green marketing have been conducted in different sectors and industries (Table 2). Scholars conducted the most research (97.59%) in B2C markets; only four studies (2.41%) were devoted to analyzing green marketing's impact on purchasing behavior in B2B markets.

**Figure 3.** Countries of research locations (the colors indicate the intensity of studies).



Approximately one-third of the studies (52 or 31.33%) were not devoted to one particular industry. Some studies focused exclusively on the energy sector and aimed to explore various facets of energy consumption (Table 3). For example, Sammer, Wüstenhagen [27], and Mydock [6] confined the analysis to the products subjected to an energy-labeling scheme. The list of such products consists of energy-efficient appliances such as washing machines. Some studies [10,11] were devoted to evaluating green marketing on energy

consumption behavior, particularly energy saving. Other researchers [28,29] envisaged the risks of greenwashing in energy companies and the possible negative impact of greenwashing on customer behavior. Considering the array of green marketing studies in the energy sector, we state that this marketing is relevant and influential when the problem of depletion of finite energy resources is so essential.

**Table 3.** Theories/models explaining the impact of green marketing on customer behavior.



**Table 3.** *Cont.*

From the 166 articles analyzed, 154 (92.77%) applied a quantitative approach to research the chosen settings, four (2.41%) a qualitative one, and eight (4.82%) combined both approaches. Although data collection in most empirical research was quantitative-led, usually applying surveys, we have also found focus groups, interviews, and discourse observations among the pool of methods. The chosen participants in many cases of researched settings were customers, while others used students, family members, and friends. Participants' numbers ranged from 10 to 3264 (254 on average). Quantitative and qualitative or mixed studies contained specific theoretical approaches.
