Motavalli Article Review Case

Review

In this article, Motavalli shows that it is important for the fleet market to make a commitment to purchase environmentally friendly vehicles. Though some companies such as Fed Ex had previously showed that they would change their fleets to more environmentally friendly vehicles, they have been lagging behind in doing so. Motavalli believes its time the fleet corporates lived up to their words. In United States only 1.1 % makes up the hybrid vehicle population. Among the states, Washington leads the pack with the highest number of hybrid electric vehicles standing at 54 % of the entire fleets in the states. In other states this percentage stands at one percent or less than that.

Among the major reasons for this delay in adoption of green vehicles is the high cost of purchasing them. Few of the American consumers have purchased these vehicles because of how expensive they are. The industry is therefore hoping that much of the purchase of the electric and plug in hybrid cars would be purchased by the government or the commercial industry. This though has not been so. The commercial industry seek to lower their operating costs and buying hybrid vehicles will make it almost impossible to do that due to their high value. Most of them like UPS would only buy hybrid vehicles if the federal government would grant to compensate for the rise in their operating cost. Though the cost of maintaining the electric hybrid vehicles is low compared to other normal vehicles which depend on gasoline which continues to rise with every single passing day, corporate fleet buyers are hesitant at replacing their fleet with these vehicles. Few companies though have made an effort in putting within their fleet portfolios quite a number of efficient environmentally friendly vehicles among them are Johnson & Johnson and General Electric. The biggest buyer of the hybrid vehicles is the federal government having purchased an estimated 650000 fleet. The government has been putting efforts to encourage both individual and commercial consumers to buy the green cars, but these efforts have only yielded a 0.3 % penetration by 2010.

This article is very important as it shows the weaknesses and areas that need to be covered to efficiently market green motor vehicles especially to corporate buyers. The idea of green marketing has been around since the 1970s and over the past decade the idea has grown into frenzy. Public interest in environmentally safe products has led to marketing strategists developing environmentally friendly products. Among the most recent developments has been the hybrid vehicle which is environmentally friendly.

Though the public is environmentally conscious, the penetration levels of these vehicles in the U.S. market is 0.3 %, which is very small. This scenario presents a challenge to marketers on what strategies could be employed in order to encourage consumers purchase more of these vehicles