How green marketing works: Practices, materialities, and images

• Green marketing can be fruitfully conceptualized using practice theory.
• Green marketing is carried out through a nexus of social practices.
• Green marketing involves enacting a reality in which the products have a clear purpose.

SummaryThere are surprisingly few empirical studies of green marketing practices, and when such studies are carried out, they tend to take a simplistic approach. In this paper, the need to develop more complex and critical analyses of green marketing practices is addressed through the development of a practice theory approach to green marketing. Drawing on an ethnographic study of the Nordic Nature Shop, this paper explores the marketing of green outdoor products. Through various marketing practices, the Nordic Nature Shop presents the purchase and use of green outdoor products as a way to carry out outdoor practices while simultaneously protecting a fragile outdoors and thereby enabling consumers to be good both in and to nature. The analysis shows that not only are green products marketed through practices, but they are also marketed as practice-enablers, that is, tools in the accomplishment of environmentally problematic practices.