In this paper we investigated how small Swedish manufacturing companies are setting prices for environmentally friendly products. We have looked at five companies from different industries and interviewed them about what environmentally related laws and regulationsthey need to follow, what measures they take to reduce their impact on the environment, how they handle costs associated with those measures and how they finally are setting the pricesfor their products. With that approach we tried to get a more holistic view and build up anunderstanding of what strategies they use and how they think when it comes to setting prices. From the interviews it became clear what difficulties it involves in estimating costs for environmentally related measures and using those estimations to set prices for their products.The costs for the measures are instead integrated with costs for other activities the companyperforms. We could see that the companies tried to find a balance between different pricingstrategies; finding a balanced mix between focusing on their own costs, their competitors' prices and their customers' perceived value of the product. It also showed that the companies, due to their size with limited resources, were forced to take a more pragmatic approach forsetting prices. They couldn’t explain well why they had set a certain price but the price theyset worked in such a way that they could sell their products with a satisfying margin. The paper is organized in the following way. We will first in the background and problem statement go through briefly the history of environmentally related work and the developmentof international protocols, agreements and laws that drives companies to develop more environmentally friendly products and adapt their operations to a more environmentallyfriendly society with less climate impact. In that part it is also defined what an environmentally friendly product is. We then go through the details about the method used for the investigation which is a qualitative method built on induction and ideas from grounded theory (Bryman & Bell, 2017). After that relevant theories related to pricing strategies and environmental management accounting are summarized. We then go through the data collection in which chapter we summarize the transcriptions of the interviews and in the chapter after analyze it with the help of thematic analysis and compare the information we have gathered with related theory. The analysis is done using five different categories which are: norms and standards, incentives, environmentally related measures, costs and pricing. The idea behind this approach is to get a more complete picture of what the companies are doing (in terms of reducing the impact on the environment), why they do it (what the incentives are) and how they do it (how they estimate costs and setting prices). Finally we go through the conclusions we can draw from the investigation and propose further research.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-118617 |
| Date | January 2023 |
| Creators | Clarke Hermansson, Frances, Herrgård, Sandra, Johansson, Jimmy |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för management (MAN) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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