Marketing

Answer

1.  

   Socially Responsible Marketing

   • Sustainable marketing - promotion of socially and environmental responsible products, brand values, and practices ().
   • Social responsible marketing (SRM)/ethical corporate marketing/green marketing - practices that companies employ to acknowledge the larger environmental and social impact of their services and products.

   VESTAS AND SCR

   Vestas employs various SRM strategies.

   1. Trust And Acceptance From Local Communities
   • Vestas does what it takes to gain the acceptance and trust of the communities in which wind farms are erected; acceptance and trust are necessary for vestas to acquire and maintain their social license to operate.
   • To obtain and maintain the social license, Vestas effectively and timely communicates with their stakeholders, ensuring that they are sensitive to local cultural beliefs, have meaningful dialogue with the stakeholders, create realistic marketing promotions and expectations, as well as develop fair grievance mechanisms
   • Vestas is transparent in their engagements with their stakeholders, disclosing their crucial sustainability information annually.
   1. Honesty And Transparency About Social Causes
   • Transparency is a crucial concept in Vestas’ engagement strategies.
   • Vestas ensures that they are transparent and honest in every advertisement, post, or cause they support, being cognizant of any unethical linkages which could be made by global marketplace consumers.
   • Vestas proves to its stakeholders, through any channel possible that they are honest, fair, and transparent in their advertisements, by publicly disclosing their key sustainability information in their annual report as well as on Vestas.com
   1. Effective Involvement Of Stakeholders
   • Vestas prioritizes working with local authorities, customers, and communities, and other players in wind farm projects to craft good associations and invest back into the community; Such relationships are useful to the company in emerging markets.
   • By working closely with the stakeholders, Vestas avoids negative impacts from the stakeholders regarding their products and activities in the environment.
   • Vestas ensures that they practice SRM by linking their marketing with their audiences on social platforms: Vestas reaches their online customer targets through social media platforms. The online communities allow Vestas to better identify their audiences, and develop marketing contents that closely align with the needs of their clients.
   • The social media platforms allow Vestas to establish themselves as an energy leader or receive recognition for their positive press, good initiates, or supportive engagements/initiatives ().
   • Through active engagement and collaboration with their stakeholders, the company is able to better their sustainability performance, redesign their products, use different materials in their product design, and change their pricing strategies
   1. Engagement in Community Activities
   • Vestas uses promotions that spread awareness regarding societal problems and issues, and channels some of their profits toward charitable initiatives.

   Example of initiatives:

   1. Community development programmes in India
   2. Improved educational conditions for teachers and students in Senegal

   iii. Transferring knowledge and skills through hands-on training in Domican Republic

   • Engagement in Community Activities
   • Through their promotions, Vestas also educates its target customers about their products, their location, and reasons to use renewable energy sources.
   • Provision of quality education for local communities – Vestas’ community development initiatives are founded on bringing education opportunities to local communities.
   • Responsible production and consumption – Vestas continuously improves its wind turbines’ efficiency and reduces its environmental impact.
   1. Environmental and social governance
   • The energy sector is currently being monitored closely for environmental pollution. Vestas ensures that their products are environmental friendly, ensuring that they use materials that are recycle/reusable, have minimum impact on the environment, or biodegradable.
   • Vestas is a signatory to international initiatives within the Economic Forum’s Partnering Against Corruption Initiative and UN Global Compact: these commitments reflect the manner in which the company operates.
   • Vestas has the “EthicsLine,” a whistleblower hotline: this works to make sure that compliance violations are brought forward and addressed accordingly.
   • By understanding their stakeholders’ priorities and opinions, Vestas is able to make better decisions and make sure that they are successful and responsible both to the community and environment.

    

   1. Environmental and social governance
   • Vestas engages both internal and external stakeholders to define what should be done, the materials that should be used to make Vestas’ products, and what changes should be made to the company’s various products and services already in the market.
   • Vestas conducts a materiality analysis – i.e The mapping of indicators and topics that reflect organizations’ significant environmental, economic, and social impacts. By recognizing material concerns, Vestas focuses their sustainability - related plans upon the areas that are most crucial both them and their stakeholders.
   • Climate action and Affordable and clean energy - Vestas’ business model is aimed at producing affordable renewable energy solutions, and to innovate continuously to better wind turbine efficiency.

   Conclusion

   Vestas employs several approaches to ensure that they uphold social responsible marketing. These include:

   1. Effective involvement of Stakeholders
   2. Environmental and social governance
   3. Honesty and Transparency about social causes
   4. Trust and acceptance from local communities