Societal Marketing - Branding in Societal Marketing

Branding in Societal Marketing

Corporations are the one who are striving during the whole time for improvements. They are turning to all kind of forms of corporate societal marketing programs to help build and repair their brand images.

Corporate Social Marketing, or CSM, usually refers to marketing efforts that have at least one social related objective, such as charity founding, among its goals. Typical examples are releasing a certain percentage of the final sale product to a charity related to the product, or sponsoring events that encourage social well-being such as the Olympic Games. Corporate Social Marketing benefits a company in many ways, but its main goal is to improve the image the public has of the company. A company that appears committed to improving the lives or others, the environment or other worthy causes is seen in a better light than one who doesn't, and more and more business are hoping to benefit from that.

So, it can be so, that CSM programs are becoming extremely popular because the leaders believe that it is a good business to be viewed as a socially responsible company . However, even though past research suggests that CSM may be effective in improving brand equity and increasing market share, there are limits to the effectiveness of these initiatives.

An example of his is how corporate social initiatives adversely affected purchase intentions if consumers perceived that the company would forgo product quality in order to be socially responsible .

Depending on the nature of the CSM program, the intent of the corporation may not be as obvious to the consumers. This happens if the benefits to the corporation are not apparent or conflicts with what the consumer already believes about a specific firm or industry.

Since firms exist to make a profit, consumers may spend considerable energy in an attempt to infer motives related to the profit-oriented goals. An example - consumer may be suspicious of a tobacco company that undertakes a campaign to prevent underage smoking. If this is successful, the company would be affected and the cigarette sales will be lowered. So, in this situation, consumers’ suspicions may lead them to infer motives that would actually protect the companies financial condition - as they are trying to improve their image to sell more cigarettes to adults. However, if a tobacco company undertook a CSM Campaign, that would sustain their business consumers may be able to infer profit motives more easily and then have a more favorable attitude toward the partnership. So it can be concluded that the attitude of the consumers could be better if they knew more about the motives of the companies and they were more obvious.

Another aspect that may cause suspicion with consumers is the amount of harm that a company has already done, either because of unsafe products or harmful production practices. It is logical that consumers are more suspicious to companies that sell harmful products. Again examples are the tobacco companies and alcohol companies as well. They will meet resistance from consumers when they undertake socially-oriented campaigns aimed at mitigating the effects of their products .

That is why when different industries are separated, two very general dimensions are used- the harmful nature of the products and the harmful nature of the production methods.

This classification can briefly show how consumer are influenced by the various CSM efforts. Companies that work in this "dangerous" industries are not that successful always, because the consumers may be suspicious of any societal efforts the company attempts to undertake. Consumers will infer less society-serving motives and more self-serving motives for corporate societal marketing programs undertaken by firms that operate in mixed or sin industries.

Based on how easily consumers could infer profit-driven motives, are classified the types of CSM campaigns: Positively tied to product sales, positively tied to product sales, not directly tied to sales but aimed at sustaining the company's business, completely unrelated.