CSR and soap bubbles

As we reported recently, our latest tracking data suggests that Indian consumers are proving to have surprisingly high expectations of companies' CSR, and don’t appear to share the increasingly cynical outlook of their Chinese counterparts.

One particularly intriguing – and perhaps counter-intuitive – finding was that Indian consumers are actually more likely to say they have heard or read about companies’ CSR activities than in most other countries we surveyed – 50%, compared to 30% globally. Of course, there may well be some over-claim here – but if not, maybe Indians have just been watching a bit more TV lately?

India’s Mint business newspaper reports that TV product placement is back with a vengeance in the subcontinent, citing Procter and Gamble’s recent promotion of its Shiksa CSR campaign around children’s rights via a storyline in a popular soap on the Star channel among its examples. And indeed, a GlobeScan colleague confirms that P&G’s efforts to raise the profile of its CSR haven’t gone unnoticed by the TV soap fans in her family in India.

Is this the way forward for companies wanting some credit for their efforts to do good? Maybe. But another trend we’ve noticed is an increasing tendency for people looking for information on what companies are doing to be more responsible to bypass companies’ own CSR messaging – reports, website content and the like – and look instead to independent online sources, including social media. CSR in sponsored soap storylines would appear to run counter to that trend. But as we've seen, the number of people aware of companies’ CSR efforts is relatively low, and hasn’t grown at all in four years. Maybe it’s not a bubble, and P&G are on to something with their soap strategy after all.

Rising expectations around CSR in India

It's sometimes asserted that corporate social responsibility is a luxury that is just too expensive for companies and consumers in the world's developing economies to worry about. Creating jobs and boosting GDP is, allegedly, all that matters.

Our latest tracking data on attitudes towards CSR in India suggests that this assessment is pretty wide of the mark. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of the Indian public say they want their government to force companies to go beyond their traditional economic roles and work to improve society, even if this means higher prices and fewer jobs. They're more demanding in this respect than the Japanese (55%), British (50%) or Americans (39%). Consumer attentiveness to CSR communications by companies also looks to be on the rise in the subcontinent. And while a highly successful company like Tata is picked out most frequently as a 'responsible company', concerns over labour standards also mean that it's the company that is most commonly mentioned as 'irresponsible'. Consumers, in other words, are conflicted - economic growth is transforming the lives of so many, but this doesn't mean that they're blind to the social and environmental costs that accompany it.

We've seen attitudes around responsible business in the world's other emerging economic superpower, China, become much more cynical in the wake of the Sanlu scandal, in which a highly respected producer of infant formula was found to have contaminated its products with melamine, and caused the death of several children. With faith in corporate leadership on the decline in India, companies are going to need to demonstrate credibly what they're doing to meet these heightened expectations, or risk government stepping in and enforcing a responsible approach to business.

Global governance: just a mirage?

With the number of intractable global problems mounting inexorably, an effective system of global governance has been the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for many decades now. It may now be as far away as ever. After an amicable but somewhat ineffective G20 summit in Toronto, Philip Stephens of the FT points out that, now the immediate financial crisis has waned, the imperative for governments to come together and co-ordinate policy across borders has also diminished. Voters, he says, expect their national government to ‘shelter them from the storms’, and governments don’t want to admit that they can’t do so without help from outside, and so resist moves that would require them to cede sovereignty.

What’s interesting is the potential contradiction at the heart of public opinion on this issue that our data reveals. The political pressure from voters for visible, unilateral action that Stephens identifies is real enough. But in the latest wave of our tracking in late summer 2009 we saw a remarkable upswing in trust in national governments to act in the interests of society (as the chart below shows)– just at a time when those governments were being forced by circumstances to come together and co-operate in a way rarely seen before. Voters may not like the idea of ceding power outside their borders, but appear to like it when progress is made. Maybe governments need to take heart from this and be more honest with voters about the pooling of sovereignty that is needed to address many of the issues that most concern them.

But if the autumn of 2008 represented a high-water mark in cooperation among national governments, December 2009 and the failure to come up with any sort of adequate deal to address climate change at Copenhagen was surely a nadir. Our next wave of tracking of trust in government, due out later this year, will show whether the mini-boom in public confidence in governments has, like the aforementioned pot of gold, vanished into thin air as soon as it appeared.

Greenwash, and why it matters

Regular readers may recall that we've talked before about the perils of greenwash.

Here's some more evidence that it's a real barrier to sustainable consumer behaviour. My colleague Eric Whan, our Director of Environmental research, writes:

"We all have ideas about why sustainable consumption has not become mainstream despite all of the effort put toward that goal. Materialism, greed, product (in)efficacy, poor communications--all of these are at least partially valid explanations.

Published this month, the National Geographic / GlobeScan "Greendex" survey of consumers across 17 countries has found that while consumption habits of the average individual have become somewhat more sustainable in more countries than not, gains have been modest. As we at GlobeScan have long said, a broad gap exists between the values that people hold as individuals (green), and their behavior as consumers (not so green).

How to narrow the gap? To get some answers, we asked 17,000 consumers this very question directly. Many will consider this method a rather blunt measurement tool, but the survey question generated the most compelling results of the 2010 Greendex study.

As this chart shows, when asked to what extent ten different factors discourage them doing more for the environment than they do now, the top rated factor was the perception that companies make false claims about the environmental profile of their products. The second greatest obstacle was a belief that individual action is futile if governments and companies do not take action themselves. Less important barriers included conventional explanations such as cost, inconvenience, confusion, and a lack of green product alternatives.

So, if we are to conclude anything from the data, it is that corporate credibility and a lack of leadership in general are the priorities that must be first adressed by those who wish to further sustainable consumption. Thus the question arises: How? I'll leave that to you."