Corporate Social Responsiblity : Just a marketing lie ?
Jan 19th, 2013 by annemazin
Nowadays, CSR or Corporate Social Responsiblity has become an increasinly “fashionable” term. That concept, which is supposed to retarget agendas of companies on stakeholder’s real needs, has provoked an icreasing amount of corporate responsiblity policies since the crisis. But, are companies really commited to the community ? Are all those responsibility policies sincerely made to show the true commitment of companies to the community ? Not really …
In 99% of cases, the real objective of companies is to improve their corporate image in order to get more customers and an increase of their market shares. And bigger market shares means more money…
But, WHAT IF companies decided to stop liying ? Okay, we all know that it’s probably cheaper for them to spend millions of dollars to reduce their carbon footprints than improve the working conditions of their subsidiaries in developping countries .. But still, wouldn’t it be awesome to buy sneakers from a very famous sport apparel company without feeling guilty because you know that it was made by a someone paid 40 cents per hour in Vietnam ?
Besides, according to C. B. Bhattacharya, “Yet executives commonly don’t understand the most effective ways to design and implement sustainability programs. Because of that they can’t fully capitalize on the potential corporate responsibility has for creating business value”.
What does that mean ? Well, it means that if corporations sincerely commited themselves to the community, consumers would probably be proud of affiliating themselves with a socially reponsible company. This would create a genuine loyalty from the consumer to the company leading to granted profits.
Let’s take the example of The Body Shop which has done an amazing job in terms of corporate social responsibility. They have shown that it’s not so hard to make environmental commitment the core of the company’s values and marketing strategy… So what are the other companies waiting for to do so ?
Source link = http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/20/corporate-social-responsibility-leadership-citizenship-marketing.html