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The purpose of this paper is to develop research frameworks for two types of green supply chains based on Fisher's seminal work. In spite of Fisher's contribution to the literature, his study has rarely been extended into green supply chain contexts, except in a few conceptual arguments. The current study explores how Fisher's perspective of efficient versus responsive supply chains can be a stepping stone to the development of two green supply chains: eco‐efficient and eco‐responsive supply chains.

Toward the above end, a case methodology is employed (Yin). Two Korean global companies, Pohang Iron and Steel Company (POSCO) and Samsung Electronics (SEC), are selected to explore eco‐efficient and eco‐responsive supply chains. POSCO (steel products) is selected to enable the understanding of how efficient and eco‐efficient supply chains work. SEC (mobile phone products) is chosen to understand responsive and eco‐responsive supply chains.

The findings suggest that POSCO tends to stress process technology innovation as a means to address green pressures, while SEC accentuates the green product strategy; while an eco‐efficient supply chain focuses on keeping to an environmental standard across the supply chains, an eco‐responsive supply chain centers on the collaboration of suppliers and distributors in greening the supply chain; and SEC takes more initiatives to educate and encourage consumers to engage in recycling activities than POSCO does.

Few studies have examined the green supply chain using the perspective of Fisher's framework (efficient vs responsive supply chains). By addressing the timely topic, this study fills a research gap in green supply chain literature.

Online web searches have played crucial roles in influencing consumers’ purchasing decisions. Web search traffic information enables researchers and practitioners to better understand consumers in terms of their preferences and interests, among other things. The purpose of this paper is to use web search traffic information provided by Google Trends to derive relationships among product brands as well as those between product brands and product attributes to propose a method to enhance the visibility of consumer brand positioning.

This study builds upon the interesting observation that consumers’ behavior in performing simultaneous searches, or searches including two or more keywords, can be converted into data indicating relationships among brands as well as those between brands and their attributes. The study focuses on the cases of hybrid cars and tablet PCs, and applies a social network analysis method to identify these relationships. Time series information on web search traffic is used because it can track these two product groups from the early stages to the present. This step is completed to verify the changes in the status of each brand and in their relationships that occurred in consumers’ minds over time.

Results show that consumers’ web search behaviors reveal the brand positioning and brand-attribute associations in their minds. Specifically, using consumers’ simultaneous search data, the authors derived relationships among brands (brand-brand network) from consumers’ behaviors of searching simultaneously for two brands and the relationships between brands and attributes (brand-product attributes network) from consumers’ behavior of searching simultaneously for a specific brand and certain product attributes.

Theoretically, this study verifies that consumers’ web search traffic information can be used to microscopically identify the positions of individual brands and their relationships in the minds of consumers. Regarding practical applications, this study proposes a method that can be used by companies to track how consumers perceive their brands by performing a simple and cost-effective analysis using the free search traffic information provided by Google.