This book presents the main framework of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in connection with International Marketing. It includes the CSR background, such as its history and examples of how organizations implemented/can implement the philosophy of CSR into their core business. It is also illustrated how companies and organizations can control and measure their social actions. Furthermore, the advantages and disadvantages of the CSR implementation within an organization were compared. This allows the reader to understand which actions are beneficial for the organization and those that are not. The potential of CSR is illustrated by several aspects, followed by a comparison of the results. Greenwashing is of great interest for the everyday person who buys products with the thought of doing something good, for example, in connection with the environment, human rights, etc. One chapter solely concentrates on this subject, demonstrating how people can avoid paying more for a product with false claims, thus abusing their good will to care about social aspects. Greenwashing is part of this book, because it can also be seen as a marketing strategy, misleading conscious consumers, bluntly called fraud. This book demonstrates how CSR can be seen as a marketing tool on an international level, through which organizations can increase not only their assets, but also their reputation making it more attractive for potential new partners and employees.

Text Sample: Chapter 4.2, Brand Differentiation: Before pointing out the role and potential of brand differentiation for CSR, you have to understand what the term ‘brand’ actually stands for. Two authors define a brand as follows. Kotler defines a brand as a ‘name, term, symbol or design, or a combination of them, which is intend to signify the goods or services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors’. Alternatively, John Murphy, founder of the Interbrand Organization, defines a brand as a ‘trademark which, through careful management, skillful promotion and wide use comes in the minds of consumers to embrace a particular set of values and attributes both tangible and intangible’. In Germany the organization ‘brands & values’ created the ethical brand monitor to measure the effect corporate social responsibility has on brands and the society: The Ethical Brand Monitor… … determines the representative status of responsible consumption and the relevance of CSR activities out of the consumer perspective. … determines the meaning of corporate social responsibility for the image and the preference of product and company brand out of the consumer perspective. … determines the social value of product and company brands in Germany. … is the quantitative foundation for the development and examination of brand and company strategy. … is a corporate project of the brand organization brands & values. The importance of a product or service brand is generally to distinguish itself from the competition and point out the brand recognition for consumers and customers. Knowing this, we can show the connection to the potential of brand differentiation and CSR. In today’s world brand differentiation is very important because product and/or service distinctions are getting harder to detect. Therefore a company has to find a differentiating factor for its product/service to distinguish the brand by giving it an extra characteristic. This is vital because the characteristics of, for example consumer products, are very similar. Thus it is recommendable for a company to communicate their social responsibility initiatives to the broad public efficiently. Through integrating their social activities into their brand, consequently these activities will be connected to the brand and will influence the buying decisions of potential consumers and customers. Awakening emotional feelings through integrating CSR initiatives on a product brand can facilitate brand differentiation and lead to a better reputation of a company and its brand. For example, Pedigree dog food has chosen to work together with the American Humane Society, who is involved in humane treatment of dogs and trying to find every dog that is in a dog pound a new home as soon as possible. Pedigree makes customers aware of this on their dog food products and has also posted a commercial spot on their homepage showing a dog that is held in a small cage. The message of this commercial is, if you buy Pedigree dog food products you will automatically help dogs to find a new home. The partnership is good for all sides. Dog owners and dog lovers suddenly prefer to buy Pedigree products, instead of others, because they know that pedigree is involved in helping dogs. Pedigree improves its revenues and helps the community by ‘clearing out their dog pounds’. Pedigree chose the right partner, because it helped the brand and the community at large. In a way, one could say that such a relationship can be seen as a symbiosis. The one profits from the other one and vice versa. Stories are better than facts. A lot of companies show numbers on their packaging that are demonstrating their social engagement, although probably not too many people will directly understand what the company does, how their brand is ‘socially involved’. When a story, at best an emotional heartbreaking one, is connected to a brand just like Pedigree has exemplary done, a strong relationship between brand and customer/consumer has been created. This source of competitive advantage is solely a difference from the competition. Communicating CSR can be in this sense a source of sales, profit and new business opportunities if the investment concept is directed towards future preferences and life attitudes of consumers/customers, and will eventually build a stronger brand which meets people’s expectations. After a brand has differentiated itself from others through communicating its social activities, how can this brand separate itself out from the non-social ones to improve the company’s reputation, credibility and revenues? The key question here is: how is the company communicating its differentiated brand? McElhaney speaks of the ‘Three Act Buying Experience’ which has three distinct parts: prebuying, buying, and postbuying. Most of the companies tend to concentrate on the prebuying experience. This means making products attractive by communicating their CSR activities through commercials, in hope that the potential customers/consumers go into a store with a certain affinity toward their product. Other companies concentrate on the buying experience. In this case they try to connect their brand with potential buyers by giving them a direct impression of how they are socially involved. A company that produces wines could, for example, put a hangtag on each bottle of wine showing that the wine came from biologically grown grapes. The postbuying experience is hard to solely make use of. Pedigree applies the postbuying experience along with the prebuying, and buying experience. A consumer can have a prebuying experience by watching a Pedigree commercial. Or the person goes into the store and sees on the packaging of a Pedigree product that of every purchased product will go towards pet adoption. And the postbuying experience can be witnessed when a person goes to the web site and looks at the pet adoption guides and adoption information that the company provides. It can generally be said that the composition of a company’s good CSR reputation is closely connected to its brand, thus through its brand differentiation. Consequently, if a company wants to be successful in the long term, its brand (company and product) must be connected with a good reputation as well as with uniqueness.

• Greenwashing

• NGO

• Partnership

• Marketing Tool

Der Diplom-Kaufmann, Kolja Peter Benedikt Paetzold, wurde 1979 in Bonn geboren. Einen Großteil seiner Jugend verbrachte er in Washington DC, USA und wuchs daher zweisprachig auf. Im Jahr 2000 wiederfuhr dem Autoren ein Schicksalsschlag in Form einer Gehirnblutung. Während der längeren Rekonvaleszenz zeit entdeckte er sein Interesse an wirtschaftlichen Themen und beschäftigte sich in diesem Bereich vorrangig mit sozialen Zusammenhängen. 2002 nahm er sein Studium der Wirtschaft an der Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in Rheinbach, NRW, auf und belegte die Schwerpunktfächer B-to-C Marketing und International Management . Das Thema seiner Abschlussarbeit Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as an International Marketing Approach spiegelt sein großes Interesse an diesem speziellen, und inzwischen sehr aktuellen, Thema im Bereich Wirtschaft deutlich wieder.