Index of Paper Presentations for the Parallel Sessions - Academy of ...

self-expression benefits (heightened esteem), the altruistic value is same as warm glow (feel good for doing publicgood) , nature experience is similar to the hedonic value (in terms of aesthetically enjoying the environment friendlyexperience).Coddington (1993) suggest that green positioning as an essential factor in the success of green branding strategies.However, consumers often have difficulty distinguishing which hotels have a strong sustainability ethic (Darnall,2008). In consumers‟ minds, performance differences between hotels are indistinct in that each hotel appears to havesimilar objectives and procedures. Therefore, simply positioning the hotel brand as a green hotel will not give thehotel firm a significant competitive advantage. Hence, it becomes imperative to develop strong green brand equity inthe minds of the consumers. Chen (2010) defined green brand equity as ―a set of brand assets and liabilities aboutgreen commitments and environmental concerns linked to a brand, its name and symbol that add to or subtract fromthe value provided by a product or service.‖HypothesesBased on the extensive review of literature about- green marketing, concepts of customers‟ experience, greenbranding and branding in service (hotel) industry – following hypotheses are made:H1: The economic green experiential value is positively associated with green brand equity.H2: The hedonic green experiential value is positively associated with green brand equity.H3: The social green experiential value is positively associated with green brand equity.H4: The altruistic green experiential value is positively associated with green brand equity.Design/Methodology-The hotel industry is chosen as the service sector for the study as it has standard certifications (LEED, ECOTEL etc.)for designating hotel services as „Green‟. The proposed research design will be descriptive in nature. To meet theobjectives of the study, the \two phased approach is adopted- qualitative and quantitative in hotels having greencertification from at least one authorized certifying agency/company, administered among the hotel‟s guests atGreen Hotels in Delhi, Jaipur and Mumbai. A total of around 100 responses were collected, out of which 45 wereusable. SPSS 16 is used for analysis. We did the median split for the data and run cross-tab analysis to check thesignificant associations.Findings and discussion-Green experiential values (social and economic) for guests of the hotel offering eco-friendly services found to bepositively associated with the green brand equity of the hotel, refer to table 1 and table 2. The analysis shows that thegreen hotel guests who feel high green experiential social value, about 73% of them, also have high green brandequity of the hotel. On the other hand, 91% of the guests at green hotels who perceive low green experiential socialvalue have low perception for green brand equity of the hotel. The chi-square value comes out to be significant.Therefore, hypothesis 3 is supported.