Employing Enviropreneurial Marketing Strategies to Gain Legitimacy

Within the current global landscape, internationalizing organizations are increasingly seeking ways to gain legitimacy, or social acceptance, within the foreign markets they exist in. This current article proposes that enviropreneurial marketing strategies can be placed in the arsenal of tools firms may employ to gain organizational legitimacy. Across two studies, this article hypothesizes and empirically tests the mediating roles that pragmatic and moral legitimacy play in the relationships between enviropreneurial marketing and outcomes on firm constituents such as consumers and employees. The results show that while pragmatic legitimacy is a significant mediator of such relationships, moral legitimacy is not.