Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

CHAPTER 17 CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND ETHICS
Indeed, company practices are not simply more visible as a result of aggressive ques-
tioning by customers, NGOs and advocacy groups, they face growing demands for trans-
parency – taking the wraps off information once considered proprietary or confidential. 
Social credibility depends in part on developing information strategies that are relevant to 
customers’ concerns, expectations and preferences – only the company that shares reliable 
information is likely to be perceived as a trustworthy ‘partner in sustainability’ by custom-
ers and other stakeholders ( Pohle and Hittner, 2008 ). 
The link between CSR efforts and customer value is likely to be moderated by the com-
pany’s credibility as a social player, shaped by its history and corporate reputation. Low 
credibility may not be an absolute barrier to implementing useful CSR initiatives, but it 
may well reduce the impact of those initiatives on customer perceptions. When consider-
ing the impact of CSR on strategy and positioning choices, it is necessary to be realistic as 
well as visionary.
17.8 
CSR and customer value 
It follows from the last section, and is suggested in Figure 17.5 , that from a strategic market-
ing perspective, the critical linkage is the one between CSR initiatives and customer value. 
This is not to deny the importance of CSR that simply does good in its own right, but rather 
emphasises value-creation through CSR, which resonates with the development of new busi-
ness models that combine social and business goals. 
The central strategic marketing question is thus how CSR impacts on the customer 
value proposition. While widely used and loosely defined, the value proposition describes 
the unique offer made to the customer, with all its hard and soft dimensions, and is at the 
centre of how a company aims to differentiate itself from competitors in its target market 
segments. In fact, there are indications that many companies have a poor understanding 
of their customers’ real concerns about social and environmental issues surrounding their 
businesses, and few are asking them – leaving suppliers to rely on assumptions about what 
CSR means to their customers. High-performing companies show a deeper understand-
ing of their customers’ CSR expectations ( Pohle and Hittner, 2008 ). Businesses need new 
sources of operational, supply chain and customer information to gain the new levels of 
insight required to meet objectives in areas such as sustainability ( IBM, 2009 ). 
In fact, in business-to-business marketing in particular, it is possible to identify three 
types of value proposition, providing an insightful framework for examining the link 
between CSR and the value proposition. Anderson et al . (2006) identify three kinds of 
value proposition: 
1 
All benefits : when asked to construct a value proposition, managers list all the benefits 
they believe their offering might deliver to target customers, with the risk they claim 
advantage from features that actually provide no benefit or value to target customers.
2