TITLE:
What Do Consumers Know about Corporate Responsible Management? A Case Study of Eight World-Leading Brands and Their Branding Strategy
AUTHORS:
Mary B. Frambo, Hans Kok, Bruno Fon
KEYWORDS:
CSR, ESG, Branding, Marketing
JOURNAL NAME:
Journal of Human Resource and Sustainability Studies,
Vol.10 No.1,
March
14,
2022
ABSTRACT: The background for the present investigation
is testing the notion that the positive effect of Corporate Social
Responsibility (CSR) on company performance can, at least partly, be explained
by the reported synergy between CSR and branding. For CSR to have a positive
effect on branding companies’ CSR efforts need to be efficiently communicated
to potential customers and potential customers need to be aware of CSR
activities of companies or associate specific brands with CSR. We investigated
recent video advertisements of globally leading brands for mention of
CSR-related themes. Secondly, in a survey, we investigated how far consumers
are aware of differences in CSR efforts of these globally leading brands. Our
results show that consumers have little idea of the CSR efforts of
world-leading brands. Furthermore, the attention to CSR-related themes in
recent video advertisements is generally not high and very low for some of the
companies.