By Bill Valentino
Even the most sophisticated marketers need the reminder from time to time that the "walk" counts for more than the "talk".
Nowadays, Corporate Social Responsibility has become a bridge that provides cohesion between disparate marketing elements and brand building, giving companies the tools to work with passion and imagination to maintain the capability to deliver everything they believe in and aspire to.
The cliché, "actions speaks louder than words" underscores the reality that "everything" communicates and this is where brands supported greatly by CSR, visibly manifest themselves through the many ways they touch people’s lives.
Branding is more important today than ever given the ever-increasing emphasis being placed on connecting corporations, their products and values to stakeholders in an emotionally profound way. Giving back to society is indisputably good business and in this context CSR has an essential role to play in creating, building and protecting brands.
The coexistence of business and social engagement has manifested itself in the founding beliefs of many companies and has become an integral part of their brand image. But this always tends to be separated from main business activities – a program run by a service department, using PR to publicize it as a badge of respectability and goodness. CSR is sometimes just tacked on to brands. The real challenge is to infuse the brand with the concept of weaving CSR into the business process and business strategy, not on the basis of being something just nice to have, but as an integral part of the process of doing business itself.
CSR excites by creating brand belief with an intuitive feel for people and a strong grasp of contemporary life and issues. It allows companies to be perceptive about changing conditions by giving them the tools to work with passion and imagination to maintain the capability to deliver everything they believe in and aspire to while at he same time contributing to the solutions of some of the most pressing problems and needs in society. It is through brands that companies get talked about and strong communities form around them inspiring loyalty.
It is here that powerful logo identities backed by powerful brand equity become the shorthand for the meanings attached to them. This greatly influences stakeholders to be receptive to the messages and perceptions communicated by logos, which act as a symbol of what a company represents or desires to represent.
These efforts ultimately join together what a brand does commercially, with what CSR does socially and environmentally for a company, thereby aiming to make them inseparable. It is here that brand building can integrate CSR into a seamless, cohesive and consistent process that creates the true definition of a brand, which is simply a collection of perceptions in the mind of consumers and stakeholders.
Marketing leadership champions brand leadership but CSR connects both marketing and branding to the heart of an organization, that is to the leadership at the very top. Within a company, CSR helps to ensure that a brand is both consistent over time and cohesive across disciplines.
While marketing is the ongoing process identifying the particular wants and needs of a target market of customers and satisfying those needs better than the competitors, branding is inextricably linked to it because it supports marketing’s sole objective to facilitate making a purchase decision. Branding facilitates this by offering strong brands that are clearly differentiated and that offer clear, real value and potential for competitive advantage to companies.
It is true that the best brands tend to have a strong sense of their past but they live in the present and aim to create the future.
Brands infused with CSR have an instinctive feel for the zeitgeist, an eye for the subtle shifts in modern culture and alertness to economic, social and environmental developments. At a brand level, companies seek to understand the way people lead their lives and go about their day, of which consumption is a part. It looks at what people do, not just what they say and explores issues like social and personal identity while developing a picture of stakeholders within the context of contemporary society. It begins to uncover how consumers are making extraordinary fundamental decisions on behalf of the brands they buy or how stakeholders interact with the companies that hold them.
Strong brands that are consistent have the power to anchor values, which liberate the brands to respond to changes in markets, culture, competition, legislation, environmental issues in whatever market they are competing in. When a brand stands for something and is able to deliver, this creates an inspiring belief backed by great capability that leads to greater brand confidence.
The business world operates today with a completely different set of values where speed has replaced stability, intangible assets have become more valuable than tangible assets and new market opportunities are not based on squeezing costs and increasing profits as in the traditional business model. Goods and services are no longer enough to attract a new market or even to maintain existing markets or customers. The combination of CSR and branding appeals more to the emotional aspect of products and services and is defining the key difference between consumers’ ultimate choice and the price they are willing to pay. The emotional aspect underscores "how a brand engages consumers and stakeholders on the level of the senses and emotions: how a brand comes to life for people and forges a deeper, lasting connection." (Marc Gobe – Emotional Branding)
The future of branding is listening carefully to stakeholders in what is called stakeholder dialogue. This enables companies to connect powerfully with them by bringing a diverse array of solutions to their world.
Traditional companies will not be able to rely on their brand history or dominance in markets. They will have to focus on providing brands with a powerful emotional content and to deliver messages about their products, which also have relevance in respect to social and environmental issues.
Through CSR, companies have the tools to connect and serve consumers and stakeholders as real living, breathing, complex people which will always win out over short-term marketing hype and will always be the key to creating the kind of brand that have a long-term emotional affect and presence in peoples lives.
In this pursuit, CSR activities should not be random but a theme that relates to a company’s business purpose. Such CSR programs can tell you how the company wants to think of itself, how it would prefer to be seen by investors, other stakeholders and the communities where they do business.
A brand is brought to life for stakeholders by the personality of the company behind it and that company’s commitment to reaching them on an emotional level. In this context, in order to remain relevant and survive, it has become essential that companies begin to align themselves with causes important to stakeholders and consumers who are constantly raising the bar for the expectations of social and environmental responsibility on the part of corporations.
In this age of consumer empowerment, corporations that are caught in the act of negligence or disregard in terms of social or environmental issues will experience a devastating negative impact on their brand equity. The bottom line is that CSR, at its core, addresses what really matters to stakeholders and that has not only proven to bolster brand equity but at the same time provided a channel through which a stakeholder / brand relationships can deepen. This holistic experience based on CSR that consumers have with products and that stakeholders have with corporate brands will have a profound impact on the future of not just branding but on how business on a whole will be conducted.
In all honesty, brands can survive without belief or without emotional connections but in terms of sustainable business, survival is just not a valid option for any organization.
Words, even words backed by actions and changes in behavior against a backdrop of an overload of advertising clutter, media scrutiny, and the seemingly limitless choices available for stakeholders are not enough. Branding, focuses on a most compelling aspect of human character, the desire to transcend material satisfaction and experience emotional fulfillment. This is how CSR, interacting with branding in companies begins to tap into the aspirational drives which underlie human motivation and as the tool to accomplish just that, branding is essential in the MBA toolkit.
About the author:
Bill Valentino, continuously working for Bayer in China since 1987, holds a MBA from Thunderbird, the Gavin School of Management, and a MA in Technology and Communications from Columbia University, New York. He co-directs the Tsinghua-Bayer Public Health and HIV/AIDS Media Studies Program and is a Senior Guest Lecturer at the Center for International Communications at Tsinghua University. He is also currently the Chairman of the European Chamber's CSR Working Group and a long-standing member of the AmCham CSR Committee in Beijing.
