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After completion of the case study, the students will be able to examine the service failures faced by Nykaa; propose a resolution to the service failures faced by Nykaa through service recovery strategies; analyse the service quality gaps faced by Nykaa and propose strategies to bridge the gaps; learn and comprehend more about business models in e-commerce; and evaluate the e-commerce business models for deciding the best fit for Nykaa.

“Nykaa” was the brainchild of Falguni Nayar, who was an IIM alumna and had worked with the Kotak Mahindra Group for nearly 20 years as a venture investor and merchant banker. After representing the group’s global operation in the UK and the USA, she became the head of the institutional equities division. In 2005, she was the Managing Director of Kotak Mahindra Bank’s project. Nayar had reached the pinnacle of her career, but something was troubling her. In 2012 when Nayar noticed anomalies in India’s beauty and personal care market, her goals were realised. Unlike in other nations such as Japan or France, the availability of beauty products in India was limited, despite significant demand, owing to product unavailability in many areas. Nayar founded “Nykaa”, an online portal for multi-beauty, personal care and well-being items that also later branched out into fashion. However, after 10 years of its establishment, Nykaa was facing challenges regarding services outages, casting doubts over Nykaa’s business model practiced by it for the past 10 years.

This case is intended for discussion in the undergraduate, postgraduate management courses and executive MBA courses with marketing specialisation, services marketing and strategic marketing.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 11: Strategy

This paper aims to see how scholarly research on Greenwashing practices and behaviour has progressed in the 21st century. There has been a lot of empirical, exploratory and conceptual work done on Green marketing, sustainable marketing and environmental marketing. However, there have been few attempts to produce a comprehensive scientific mapping of Greenwashing as a niche topic. As a result, the study’s goal is to elicit research trends through knowledge structure synthesis.

A Bibliometric Analysis on the topic of Greenwashing practices was undertaken on 355 publications. For this, a scientific search strategy was run on the Scopus database for the period 1996–2021. The study was conducted using Biblioshiny, a Web-based application that is part of the Bibliometric package. Important journals, countries, authors, keywords and affiliations were found using the software’s automated workflow and thematic evolution, citations, co-citations and social network analysis were performed.

The study indicated a gradual increase in the research related to Greenwashing practices. The findings show a relative concentration of more influential work in the said domain amongst a handful of research scholars. Many influential studies have occurred after 2007, and a rally is seen in the studies on Greenwashing till 2020. The authors can say that the rigour of research has started increasing since then. Geographic dispersion of the work has shown that the USA followed by the UK dominates the scholarly inquiry and these countries have major collaboration with European and Asian researchers. The 10 most productive countries were examined, and it was discovered that the USA contributed the majority of the publications, with the UK and China coming in second and third place, respectively, in terms of publication in the said sector. In addition to the domain’s conceptual structure, the study exposes the domain’s social and Intellectual structure. This brings up new possibilities for Greenwashing studies in the future.

The present research is a Bibliometric analysis that is restricted to science mapping, and hence, limitations apply to the said studies. Researchers can use systematic literature review to build a robust conceptual foundation in the future. The Scopus database was used for this study because it has a greater number of high-quality journals in structured forms that are compatible with Bibliometrix software.

Greenwashing practices and behaviour, as well as their links to sustainability, are discussed in this paper. It highlights the most often stated challenges in the discipline and suggests possible research topics. It provides future scholars with information on this discipline’s issues, contexts and collaboration opportunities.

The current study can give further directions to the researchers for conducting rigorous research on Greenwashing behaviour and practices and will guide the policymakers to formulate policies in the field of non-sustainable activities, with Greenwashing being one of them.

A lot of work is done by the scientific community in Green marketing research, and a lot of literature is available on Green and Sustainable marketing practices. However, there is still a need felt for more extensive and rigorous research on the evolution of Greenwashing methods. This study makes a significant addition in that it brings together the scattered literature in the field, focuses on important sources, authors and documents, and investigates Greenwashing techniques and behaviour, which is the other side of the sustainable practices coin.