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.