Understanding the relationship between green approach and marketing innovations tools in the wine sector

Over the last years, research about sustainability has been interesting due to growing importance of green orientation in the consumer purchasing process. In particular, in the wine industry producers' environment-friendly behaviour, in terms of organic winemaking, agricultural waste recovery, efficient water use, can represent a high-powered chance to differentiate products and to face new market challenges. Understanding consumer expectations and new purchasing trends by means of marketing tools leads the wine producers to adopt green oriented innovations. Therefore, this research sought to investigate the relationship between marketing innovation tools and green firm approach. Structured online questionnaires were used to ascertain the views of 280 wineries in Apulia region, in South Italy, that has a very long history as a wine producer. Findings of this study indicate that wineries with marketing innovative tools seem to have a more eco-friendly approach, since the sustainability orientation can be considered a crucial issue in the framework of the new firm competitiveness challenges. Finally, implications shed some light on the importance of adopting suitable marketing and communication tools to address wineries towards sustainability based trends. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.