Mapping the Green Frontier: Bibliometric Analysis of Sustainable Marketing & Consumer Behavior in Hospitality

What the paper says

Environmental sustainability and green marketing have emerged as critical priorities within the hospitality industry. Nonetheless, a comprehensive understanding of how these concepts intersect—especially regarding consumer behavior, corporate strategies, and emerging technological enablers—remains underexplored. This study bridges that gap by employing an extended, cross-database bibliometric approach that integrates advanced co-occurrence, co-citation, bibliographic coupling, and co-authorship analyses. Drawing on a robust dataset of 67,059 articles extracted from Scopus and ABS-indexed journals—and triangulated with 229 core studies filtered from the Web of Science (WoS)—we map the evolution of primary thematic clusters and subtopics over time. These include green supply chain management, pro-environmental purchase intention, AI-driven eco-innovation, transformative tourism, and crisis management. Our methodology involves refining and applying carefully curated keyword sets (e.g., “green marketing,” “pro-environmental behavior,” “hospitality,” “consumer behavior”), extracting large-scale records from Scopus and ABS-indexed journals, and incorporating WoS core studies to ensure comprehensive coverage and cross-validation of emerging trends, and utilizing specialized clustering techniques—such as fractional counting, LinLog normalization, and modularity-based clustering—to achieve high-resolution thematic groupings. The advanced analyses reveal two dominant yet interlinked research domains: (a) corporate sustainability and marketing strategies, and (b) attitudinal and psychological factors driving pro-environmental consumer behavior. Key results indicate that green marketing approaches—underpinned by robust brand image, CSR initiatives, and circular economy practices—significantly influence purchase intentions and consumer loyalty, particularly in hotels and tourism settings. Moreover, digital transformation, evidenced by the integration of AI-based personalization and big data analytics, is reshaping consumer engagement by enabling real-time, data- driven insights to predict and influence eco-friendly behaviors. These findings highlight the multidisciplinary and rapidly evolving nature of green marketing research, calling for intensified cross- disciplinary collaboration among marketing, environmental psychology, and technological innovation. For practitioners, our results highlight the necessity of implementing authentic, data-driven green strategies to meet the demands of increasingly eco-conscious consumers. Thus, the originality of this study lies in its holistic, state-of-the-art bibliometric methodology, which elucidates not only the historic landscape of green marketing research but also the emergent frontiers that can guide both researchers and industry stakeholders toward more impactful sustainability practices.