A Research Framework for B2B Green Marketing Innovation: the Design of Sustainable Websites

In recent years, sustainability has become one of the key pillars of B2B manufacturing companies. Green marketing can be considered a subset of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) strategies. It allows reaching responsible innovation in a company, and thus to diversify the types of innovation. An example of green marketing innovation is the design of sustainable website. However, the literature remains scarce in this field, as sustainability is frequently mainly focused on products and processes. The design of a sustainable website requires the implementation of technical factors, but it should not be at the expense of the website quality or take too long to implement. That is the reason why webmaster constraints such as Search Engine Optimization (SEO), User Experience (UX), Culturalization (CZ) or Working Time (WT) have to be considered in the sustainable website design process. This study proposes the creation of a research framework permitting to prioritize the sustainable website design (SWD) factors according to the webmaster constraints by using AHP method. The objective is to better assist the marketers during the design of sustainable website. A case study conducted in an international B2B manufacturing company permits to validate the proposed approach and the results indicate that the webpage weight has been identified as the prior SWD factor for this company. This contribution permits adequate decision making during the design of sustainable website by among project stakeholders, such as marketers, webmasters and managers, and more generally achieving green marketing innovation in a company.