Marketing Strategy and Competitive Positioning pdf ebook

Figure 
17.3 
Pressures 
driving defensive 
CSR strategies
Defensive
CSR
Consumers
B2B customers
Investors
Lobby groups
Suppliers
Employees and
managers
Competitors

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DEFENSIVE CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY INITIATIVES
showed hair being torn or plucked from Angora rabbits, leaving the animals in agony. The 
retailer response was defensive, to avoid damage by association with producer practices 
(Hansegard, 2013).
Porter and Kramer (2006) warn about defensive forms of CSR – particularly in terms of 
responding to the challenges of pressure groups – in that companies seeing CSR only as a 
way to placate pressure groups often find that this approach turns into a series of short-term 
public relations actions, with minimal social benefit and no strategic benefit for the busi-
ness. They suggest the most common corporate responses to CSR have not been strategic 
and are often little more than cosmetic. Nonetheless, the risks in remaining inactive when 
social demands become severe are considerable.
The changing policies at Coca-Cola are illustrative. Coke has attracted a barrage of 
negative publicity over recent years: the alleged mistreatment of workers in Colombia; the 
use of water in drought-stricken parts of India; delaying acceptance of responsibility for 
contaminated product in Belgium in 1999; violently ejecting shareholder activists from the 
AGM; and playing a major role in fuelling the childhood obesity epidemic sweeping the 
developed world. Coke has been actively boycotted on university campuses throughout 
North America, and in parts of Europe. The company was in danger of replacing Nike 
and McDonald’s as the chief corporate villain for the anti-globalisation movement. The 
problem, recognised by management, was the negative perceptions of the company that 
were progressively undermining the value of the brand. The new CEO of Coke mandated 
a proactive company approach to social issues, with a goal of making Coke the ‘recognised 
global leader in corporate social responsibility’. The company has undertaken an audit of 
labour practices throughout its supply chain, launched several water-conservation projects, 
embraced industry guidelines restricting the sale of sugary drinks in schools and supported 
initiatives to encourage physical exercise among children. Nonetheless, critics still claim 
the company is pursuing these initiatives under pressure, not because it believes they are the 
right things to do (Ward, 2006). Certainly the company’s recent attempt to present itself as 
an anti-obesity campaigner backfired badly, illustrating the difficult balancing act for food 
and drink companies in an increasingly health-conscious world (Rappeport, 2013).
The managerial goal in a defensive CSR mode should be to anticipate and develop 
appropriate responses to social demands from any source that threatens to undermine 
the value and credibility of brands, the attractiveness of the competitive position upon 
which the company’s strategy depends and the viability of the marketing strategy itself. 
However, it is important that social initiative responses to these pressures should be care-
fully evaluated for likely effects, rather than constitute an unthinking knee-jerk reaction 
by management.
Management attention can usefully be given to examining the links between CSR stance 
and the impacts on consumers, business-to-business customers, investors, lobby groups, 
suppliers, employees and managers, and competitors. The goal should be to carefully evalu-
ate the possible positive and negative impacts of CSR efforts on each of these groups.
17.5.1 Consumers and CSR
The adoption of social causes by organisations has often been based on the assumption that 
consumers will reward this behaviour (Levy, 1999). It is, however, unlikely that consumers 
will blindly accept social initiatives as sincere, and so may or may not reward the firm with 
positive attitudes and purchases (Becker-Olsen et al., 2006). Indeed, research suggests that 
consumers will ‘punish’ firms that are perceived as insincere or manipulative in their social 
involvement (Becker-Olsen et al., 2006). Nonetheless, there have been some research findings 
suggesting that there is a link between a company’s social initiatives and positive consumer 
responses in attitudes, beliefs and behaviours, and positive associations have been found 
between social initiatives and price, perceived quality, corporate attitudes and purchase 
intentions (Becker-Olsen et al., 2006). In fact, one study underlines that: customers will pay 

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