Prof K.S Chandrasekar
Corporate Social Responsibility is defined as “a commitment to improve community well-being through discretionary business practices and contributions of corporate resources”. Some of the benefits of being socially responsible include, enhanced company and brand imageeasier to attract and retain employees, increased market share, lower operating costs andeasier to attract investors. A socially – responsible firm will care about customers, employees, suppliers, the local community, society, and the environment. CSR can be described as an approach by which a company recognizes that its activities have a wide impact on the society and that development in society in turn supports the company to pursue its business successfully and actively manages the economic, social, and environmental and human rights.This approach is derived from the principles of sustainable development and good corporate governance. Marketing managers within different firms will see some social issues as more relevant than others. The relevance of a given social issue is determined by the company’s products, promotional efforts, and pricing and distribution policies but also by its philosophy of social responsibility. In this context, it is important that corporate social responsibility other than being regulated by Law, has to become way of life in corporates in the interests of the society.
Ethical conflicts in business arise in two contexts: First, when there is a difference between the needs of the three aforementioned groups (the company, the industry, and society) a conflict may arise. Second and ethical conflict may arise when one’s personal values conflict with the organization. In either case, a conflict of interest is a possible outcome.An example of the first type of conflict is the tobacco industry. Cigarettes have for many decades been a lucrative business. So, cigarette and tobacco marketing have been for companies and good for the tobacco industry. Many thousands of people around the world are employed in the tobacco industry. So, the world economy has been somewhat dependent on cigarettes and tobacco. However, cigarettes are harmful to society. There is documented proof that cigarette smoking is harmful to health. This is an ethical conflict for cigarette marketers. An example of the second type of conflict, when one’s personal values conflict with the organizations occurs when a leader in the company seeks personal gain (usually financial profit) from false advertising. “Cures” for fatal diseases are one type of product that falls into this category of ethical conflict: In their greed to make a profit, a marketer convinces those who may be dying from an incurable disease to buy a product that may not be a cure, but which a desperately ill person (or members of his or her family) may choose to purchase in an effort to save the dying family member suffering. Promoting and marketing such products violates rules of business ethics. Ethical dilemmas facing marketing professionals today fall into one of three categories: tobacco and alcohol promoting, consumer privacy, and green marketing. Standards for ethical marketing guide business in efforts to do the right thing. Such standards have four functions: To help identify acceptable practices, foster internal control, avoids confusion, and facilitates a basis for discussion.
Consumerism is concerned with broadening the rights of consumers. The concepts of social responsibility and consumerism go hand-in-hand. If every organization practiced a high level of social responsibility the consumer movement might never have begun. Consumerism is a struggle for power between buyers and sellers; specifically, it is a social movement seeking to increase the rights and powers of buyers in relation to sellers.Nowadays, most ethicists believe that relationship marketing is a reasonable practice leading to positive relationships between buyers and sellers. Relationship marketing requires that rules are not necessarily contractual. Relationship marketing allows buyers and sellers to work together. However, there are disadvantages to this approach that means relationship marketing requires time to develop a list of expected conduct or “rules of behavior.” The next important area the marketer need to know about what is the relevance of Social Marketing in order to protect the environment and to improve the quality of life and are concerned with issues that include conservation of natural resources, reducing environmental pollution, protecting endangered species, and control of land use. Many companies are finding that consumers are willing to pay more for a green product.
The last three decades have seen a progressive increase in worldwide environmental consciousness. This has been driven by a number of factors from increased media coverage to rising evidence of environmental problems such as the depletion of the ozone layer, acidification of rivers and forest degradation, global warming, the rise of pressure group activity, tougher legislation and major industrial disasters. Concern has moved from the local scale to a national and increasingly global scale. Environmental degradation has intensified over the years. Kumar, Krishna researched that the nineteenth century brought the first large scale pollution as companies geared themselves to produce goods as fast as possible, with virtual disregard for human or environmental well-being. Nations battled for industrial supremacy using raw materials and creating pollution at a staggering rate. As countries became economically stronger, competition also grew. More efficient production methods were employed, and few companies, if any, gave a thought to the impact they were having on their surroundings. With the increase in water pollution from the chemical works, and air pollution from the iron and steel industry, towns and cities began to pay the price for high industrial productivity. For businesses dealing directly with environmental resources, such as agriculture, tourism or oil, the importance of the physical environment has always been apparent. Society in its present form and on its current trajectory of development, however, cannot be sustained indefinitely.
According to researchers, the physical environment has limited resources and limited capacity to absorb pollution and waste. The underlying cause of society’s current unsustainability relates to the way in which economics and technology have come to dominate our thinking about business and the environment. Conventional marketing within industry is very much a product of this techno-economic perspective. This has created a ‘grey’ culture which is not sustainable and is therefore terminal. To transform this into a ‘green’ sustainable culture, there is a need to balance consideration of the economic and technical impacts and aspects of businesses with understanding of their social and physical implications.Green marketing is another area. For majority of the companies improving environmental performance has, until recently, been a question of legislative compliance and occasional reactions to external events and pressures. It has only been companies in the front-line sectors such as oil, chemicals, power and cars that have gone beyond a reactive and tactical approach to green issues. However, by early 2000s a shift away from a technical-compliance oriented approach towards a more proactive green strategy orientation was noticed. Companies were increasingly pursuing competitive advantage and product differentiation by increasing investment in environmental marketing, green design and improving overall corporate eco-performance. The changes that are needed to safeguard the future of the environment and the economy must partly be driven from the business community, which means they must proactively integrate eco-performance into the strategies, systems and cultures of the organization. For example, Toyota has become quite successful with their hybrid cars.
As there is very high competition among the marketers in India and that has been necessitated due to the fact that consumerism is on the high and the importance of marketing is known to people. An interaction between business and industry in a global perspective has become imperative because of the need to upgrade regional technologies and maintain the competitive edge in the international markets. Today’s consumer is more demanding than yester-years’. He is not content with the second best in technology and is reluctant to pay for a product or a service just because it comes from a particular region or a country. This, understandably, has led to business and industry across the world to make use of technologies and resources worldwide to upgrade their products and services. In this modern digital era to become an integral part of the global system, nations are opening up their economies at a rapid rate, which were hitherto protected from world markets. The removal of artificial barriers to trade has and should made it possible for innovative companies to go in search of new markets across borders with improved efficiency and greater competitive strength. This has forced the Indian companies to be competitive on the marketing front and be socially responsible.
(The author is Vice Chancellor, Cluster University of Jammu)
