Green Up Your Corporate Social Responsibility

Offering products designed with sensitivity to environmental welfare—green products—improves the attractiveness of a store carrying them. A University of Indiana analysis of 75 green product introductions finds that this doesn’t uniformly equate to more buying of the products, though. Increased profitability often comes from purchases of items not carrying the green designation. In fact, the presence of socially conscious products makes it more likely the customer will buy products that do not embody social consciousness. It’s as if having chosen the store is enough to satisfy the shopper’s desire to display green values.
     By comparison, when a brand designs its corporate social responsibility programs to benefit environmental welfare, the positive emotion among consumers results in increased purchases of the related products.
     For their analyses, researchers at Imperial College London and University of Southern California sorted CSR initiatives into three categories—targeted to fair labor practices, such as contributing resources for the betterment of its employees; targeted to community philanthropy, such as making donations to nonprofit organizations; and targeted to environmental sustainability, such as supporting the welfare of nature.
     Participants in the set of studies were each provided a description of a wine brand, hand soap brand, or stationary paper brand which engaged in one of the three types of CSR initiative, or in no CSR initiative. Each participant was also invited to purchase the described product, using a portion of money given to all as a stipend for study participation.
     Compared to those people not told of the brand’s CSR initiative, those told of an environmental CSR were more likely to spend their money purchasing the product. This was not generally true when the CSR initiative was described as targeted to employee welfare or community philanthropy.
     Further aspects of the studies identified the explanation for the effect as moral elevation, a characteristic measured by high degree of agreement with statements such as “The brand moves me because of the ideas it represents” and “The brand makes me want to be a better person.” CSR efforts targeted to environmental welfare generated greater moral elevation, and the moral elevation resulted in higher sales of the associated products.
     In the marketplace, shoppers will look for evidence beyond the CSR programs to judge the true values of a brand. Still, the general truth is that enabling shoppers to feel good about themselves improves sales, and environmentally-targeted CSR helps with that.

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