Green Marketing Practices, Sustainable Consumer Behaviour, and Their Influence on Brand Loyalty in Emerging Economies

Abstract

Green marketing has moved from a peripheral corporate social responsibility gesture to a mainstream strategic positioning tool, yet its effectiveness in cultivating genuine, durable brand loyalty remains empirically contested, particularly in emerging economies where environmental consciousness, purchasing power, and institutional trust in corporate environmental claims interact in ways that differ substantially from the high-income-country contexts in which much of the foundational green marketing literature was developed. This paper reviews the theoretical and empirical literature connecting green marketing practice, sustainable consumer behaviour, and brand loyalty, synthesizing foundational green brand equity and green trust models with the theory of planned behaviour's application to green purchase intention, the greenwashing and green-skepticism literature, and the growing body of emerging-economy-specific empirical studies from India, China, and Southeast Asia. Particular attention is given to the mediating role of green trust and green perceived risk in the relationship between green marketing communication and brand loyalty, and to the structural market conditions, price sensitivity, regulatory enforcement variability, and information asymmetry, that distinguish emerging-economy green consumption from the developed-market context. Distinct comparative tables map theoretical constructs onto their standard empirical measurement approach, contrast trust-building green marketing mechanisms against the corresponding greenwashing risk each is vulnerable to, and set emerging-economy structural conditions against their documented net effect on the green-marketing-to-brand-loyalty pathway. The paper concludes that green marketing's effect on brand loyalty in emerging economies is consistently mediated by green trust rather than operating as a direct effect, and identifies cross-national comparative validation of green trust mediation models as the central future research prospect.