Strategic corporate social responsibility as global brand insurance

When the competitive strategies of multinationals rely on global brands, corporate social responsibility (CSR) offers insurance against management lapses. The practical need for CSR as brand insurance comes from changing social expectations, affluence, and globalization. Corporate actions that violate societal expectations damage, even destroy, brand image among networked stakeholders who are affluent enough to buy branded products and services. The premiums for CSR brand insurance are paid by leaders who create an organization-wide commitment to CSR as a means of redefining ‘profit maximization.’ By integrating a stakeholder perspective, management is best placed to optimize stockholder returns over the longer term.     

Effects of organisational culture on brand portfolio performance

Many consumer goods firms have a wide brand portfolio. If these are not carefully managed, it can lead to brand proliferation, and result in complex organisational structure, lack of focus and resource constraints. Drawing on previous work on the role of leaders in effective brand management, this study explores the effects of organisational culture on brand portfolio performance. Based on a mail survey of consumer goods companies, the findings show that leadership, company vision, staff rewards, motivation and ownership are crucial to brand portfolio performance. Likewise, a brand orientation helps brand focus, coordination, and emphasises shared vision and the long-term orientation. This study contributes to the organisation-wide approach to brand portfolio management.     

Use corporate culture to trigger high performance.

The challenge is to manage the organization's culture so that you can tap the company's strengths to achieve superior performance and identify its weaknesses in time to overcome them before they cause serious damage.     

Creating a candid corporate culture

In 1982 Posner and Schmidt surveyed the values of 1400 managers. The survey revealed that honesty was one of the qualities that these managers admired most in themselves. An earlier study by Brennan and Molander indicated that managers believed that honesty in communication was their greatest ethical challenge. If honesty is a prevalent value among managers then why is honesty in communication their greatest ethical challenge? This paper presents an insight into the answer to this question and into the beliefs and norms of behavior that foster either a candid corporate culture or a culture that lacks candor.     

Commitment for hire? The viability of corporate culture as a MNC control mechanism

This paper discusses the effectiveness of corporate culture as a control mechanism in the multinational context. While there is widespread managerial support for its use, there is also considerable challenge to the idea that corporate culture can be ‘managed’. A review of relevant literature dealing with the internalisation of corporate values, organizational commitment, psychological ownership, and corporate identification provokes questions about the viability of corporate culture as a MNC control mechanism. Much depends on individual employee responses that range from support to outright resistance, and may be moderated by variables, such as managerial action and the extent of violation of the psychological contract. It is concluded that, in the long run, it may not be in the best interests of MNC management to have a strong corporate culture. A workforce of highly inculcated employees might, in fact, impede MNC management's need for strategic changes.     

Risk Management as a Tool for Sustainability

Although risk and uncertainty are inevitable aspects of the sustainability problem, they are often neglected in the sustainability discourse, especially in the economic analysis of sustainable development. We argue that this deprives the sustainability discourse of interesting connections to risk management. We show that defining sustainability as the obligation to limit the risk of harming future individuals provides a framework in which tools from risk management, like mean-variance analysis, can be employed to analyze planning decisions and to calculate a risk-minimizing policy mix. Furthermore, we discuss whether such a notion of sustainability can be an ethically tenable sustainability concept and how a positive probability of harming future individuals might be defended.     

Developing a brand performance measure for financial services brands

With no universal approach for measuring brand performance, we show how a consumer-based brand measure was developed for corporate financial services brands. Churchill's paradigm was adopted. A literature review and 20 depth interviews with experts suggested that brand loyalty, consumer satisfaction and reputation constitute the brand performance measure. Ten financial services organisations provided access to their consumers. Following a postal survey, 600 questionnaires were analysed through principal components analysis to identify the consumer-based measure. Further testing revealed this to be a valid and reliable brand performance measure.     

Internationalization as a driver of the corporate social performance of extractive industry firms

In this paper, we investigate the impact of internationalization on the corporate social performance (CSP) of extractive industry firms (EIFs). We argue that internationalization positively impacts their CSP because, as they internationalize, they increasingly benefit from actions that help them enhance their social licenses to operate (SLOs) and hence have a greater need to increase both the overall social (SP) and environmental (EP) aspects of their CSP. We hypothesize that as EIFs internationalize, both their SP and EP grow; that SP grows more relative to EP; and that the level of development of EIFs’ home countries moderates these relationships.     

Acceptability of operations as an indicator of corporate social performance

There has been much theoretical debate on issues of business ethics during the last decades, but there has been little research which could concretise the content of these issues in terms of practical business. Although business life must frequently deal with concepts such as corporate social performance, business ethics and the acceptability of operations, the content and meaning of these concepts has remained flexible. In addition, rapid internationalisation and globalisation have introduced a number of new phenomena related to corporate social performance. An attempt at defining the concepts more precisely and searching for a potential indicator was considered necessary in order to concretise the business environment facing corporations engaged in internationalisation and globalisation. The connection between corporate social performance and stakeholder theory provides a basis for the proposal put forward here that acceptability of operation could be employed as an indicator of corporate social performance. This approach was then applied to developing a model which could be used to assess corporate social performance.     

Creating a corporate culture in support of a global strategy

If U.S. companies want to succeed both domestically and internationally, that means many need to begin now making some major changes to their corporate cultures.     

Exploring corporate citizenship and purchase intention: mediating effects of brand trust and corporate identification

Corporate citizenship represents various organizational activities and status related to the organization's societal and stakeholder obligations. This study develops five different dimensions of corporate citizenship and examines the relationship between the five dimensions and purchase intention by including two key mediators. In the proposed model of this study, purchase intention is indirectly affected by economic, legal, ethical, general philanthropic, and strategic philanthropic citizenship via the mediation of corporate identification and brand trust. Empirical testing using a survey of 353 consumers from various industries confirms most of our hypothesized effects. Last, managerial implications for corporate leaders and limitations of our findings are discussed in depth.     

顶级技师托起培罗蒙品牌

有史以来服装行业所取得的成就直属于那些富有创造力的设计者以及心灵手巧的制衣技师们。创建于1928年的上海培罗蒙西服公司．其品牌就是由几代名师一起托起的而人们之所以去买培罗蒙西服就是认准了衣出名师“四个字培罗蒙无疑是响当当的“中华老字号”。     

Change and continuity in management systems and corporate performance: Human resource management,corporate culture,risk management and corporate strategy in South Korea

Embedded traditional management systems can change under the influence of several forces. The 1997 Asian financial crisis was such an event. This paper empirically investigates changes in the human resource management, corporate culture, risk management and competitive strategy parts of management systems in the General Trading Companies of South Korea in terms of internal perceptions of impact on corporate performance. It finds both change and continuity, particularly in corporate culture. This indicates that cultural change in organisations is not an easy task, not least because it is associated with changes in the values, attitudes, expectations, beliefs and behaviour of people. It also shows the importance of disaggregating trends as there can be simultaneously change and continuity.     

History matters: The role of history in corporate brand strategy

This article explores how an organization can use its history to define and deliver its corporate brand strategy. We specifically look at Adidas, which, having rejected its history at one stage, rediscovered and used the philosophy and ideas of its founder to provide direction for the future, legitimate strategic choices, and enrich the corporate brand. Through analysis of material evidence and interviews with senior and long-serving employees, we conceptualize the way Adidas developed a systematic approach to the use of history in its corporate brand strategy by creating the means to uncover, remember, curate, and then embed it. Combining the lessons of the Adidas case with evidence from other cases in which history was used to refocus and revitalize corporate brands, we deliver key recommendations for managers.     

茶叶品牌建设需要怎样的文化？

说茶叶品牌的经营．就不能不说一说文化，而要打造一个茶叶的奢侈品品牌，就更不能不重视其中包含的文化。因为对于奢侈品而言．其品牌文化中蕴含的价值往往大大高于物品本身。而品牌文化，正是品牌价值的一个重要组成部分。     

What and how to communicate about a corporate brand with the consumers: An exploratory study

The present exploratory study investigates the differential impact of various relevant corporate brand associations on consumers' cognitive (product attitude and purchase intention) and affective responses (affective corporate commitment) in the three sectors, namely durables, services and fast moving consumer goods. The findings reveal that corporate brand associations can be categorised into two categories – universal associations, which are influential in all the sectors, and sector-specific associations, which have a differential effect on consumers in different sectors. Thus, this study reveals that corporate branding is important to consumers in all the sectors, but a single corporate brand story does not work in all the sectors. Further, corporate associations do not always have a positive effect on the consumers; under certain circumstances, these might either have no effect or have a negative effect on the consumers. Finally, there are two routes by which corporate brand associations can influence consumers – by affecting their cognitive responses or by influencing their affective responses towards the company. The recognition of the important corporate brand associations in the three sectors, and the routes (cognitive or affective) through which these associations influence consumer choices would enable marketers to develop more sophisticated corporate communication strategies.     

绿色消费应当作全新的消费方式来把握

目前每每谈论绿色消费，人们想到的就是绿色产品的生产、技术、标准、认证、营销与消费、其实，这样理解绿色消费很不全面，生产、技术、标准、认证与营销属于生产、流通的范略，绿色消费固然不能缺少绿色生产与绿色流通的条件，却并不以它们为内容构成，否则，就会造成理论混乱，影响我们从绿色消费本身去研究绿色消费的发展问题，消费绿勾通产品当然属于绿色消费，但如果说它就是绿色消费，那我们的祖先早已有绿色消费，偏远落后地区的人们正在进行绿色消费，如此绿色消费，还有什么内涵与价值呢？笔者以为，所谓绿色消费，是我们对于自身长期以来无视生态环境而片面追求高额消费行为的深刻反思，并在此基础上提出的坚持在人与自然和谐统一中实现需要全面，持续与最大化满足的全新的消费方式，这样认识问题，我们对绿色消费的理论研究才能系统，深入，也才能引导消费在新世纪真正走向文明、健康与科学。