CONSBRANDS

• Principal investigators: Marco Bertini and Oriol Iglesias
• Research group: Research Group on Judgements & Decisions in Marketplace (JUICE)
• Funding body: MICINN-MCIU

About the project

During the last two decades, many brands have tried to meet some of the societal challenges such as climate change and increasing inequalities among countries and within societies, through Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programmes. Undoubtedly, CSR has helped brands to develop a more conscientious approach to business. However, too many organisations have adopted CSR as a reaction to pressure from external stakeholders to behave in a socially-responsible manner and reduce negative externalities, or as a mechanism to manage potential risks and burnish corporate reputations. Moreover, in most cases CSR efforts do not touch on or address two key contemporary challenges debated in the marketing, brand management, and ethics literatures.

Corporate brands face growing pressure to develop new management approaches capable of giving a holistic response to the expectations of diverse stakeholder groups, of creating longer-term benefits beyond those that are purely financial, and of fostering conscientious approaches to value creation for all economic agents. However, the shortcomings that have become evident in the conceptualisation and practice of CSR, coupled with the growing expectation of stakeholders that businesses play a larger role in tackling pressing existential problems, suggest moving beyond taking a more “strategic” approach to CSR. This is the rationale behind the emergence of conscientious corporate brands.

Conscientious corporate brands define and embrace a transformative purpose and a set of guiding principles that drive value creation. This is about understanding and embracing the responsibilities that corporate brands have beyond serving their clients and shareholders, which itself comes from considering the varying needs and expectations of employees, partner businesses and society at large. Additionally, conscientious corporate brands consider our planet as another stakeholder that they need to preserve and serve. Importantly, this broader, authentic perspective implies not only taking into consideration the different stakeholders of a corporate brand, but also offering them the opportunity to co-create the organization’s social and environmental agenda.

There is a clear and pressing need to further the conceptualisation of the phenomenon and conduct rigorous empirical tests, both qualitative and quantitative, to test relevant hypotheses and generate knowledge that can be then transferred to practice via relevant managerial frameworks. This research project aims to achieve three general objectives:

• To study empirically the antecedents and outcomes of conscientious corporate brands, as well as the underlying value (co)creation processes.
• To further our current understanding of the (increasingly common) use of transparency by conscientious corporate brands as a means to engage consumers and manage their expectations. In particular, the focus is on supply chain transparency and the willful, and at times even legislated, communication of cost information by organizations to shape consumers’ inferences about product quality and the morality of prices.
• To promote the transfer of knowledge generated by the different research lines among the research community, the business community (including regulators and policy makers), and society in general.