Green marketing strategy has increasingly become a sustainable business operation goal, and Green Marketing Audit (GMA) is an effective measurement tool. In order to satisfy the green marketing quality assurance, the tight integration of green marketing missions, competition, stakeholders’ requirements, and business activities are necessary. This study focuses on the establishment of green marketing audit criteria and priority sequence, using Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) to combine the Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) techniques. The major contributions of this study are as follows: (1) the proposed model provides a new practical architecture of GMA, which incorporates the experience and judgment of professional experts, and satisfies the needs of existing internal auditing operations; and (2) the GMA evaluation shows that linking the green marketing activities and firm performance contributes to the development of green marketing strategy management in Taiwan.

Introduction

Sustainable city development is an increasingly important focus of government policy, where the alignment of climate change and low-carbon strategy implementation are the key challenges (Mi et al., 2019). In the complex business world, traditional business operation strategies are insufficient to face increasingly strict environmental policies, stakeholder requirements, and the competition for innovation products/services. Implementing internal green practices and introducing monitoring mechanisms into firm operational processes can contribute to environment performance (Li et al., 2018). Regarding internal green marketing actions, Papadas et al. (2018) indicated that strategic green marketing and internal green marketing actions have positive influence on competitive advantage. The success of green marketing strategy depends on the effective implementation of green marketing activities. Although many approaches and checklists of marketing audit have been proposed (Herhausen, Egger and Oral, 2014; Morgan, Clark and Gooner, 2002), the main focus is limited to the audits of sales and collection (Taghian and Shaw, 2008). Given the impact of growing consumption on the environment, the number of companies developing green products has been rapidly increasing, and consumers have shown an increasing interest in these green products (Dangelico and Vocalelli, 2017).