Hopping onto the CSR Bandwagon
Dalia Wahba - CID Consulting
The Egyptian revolution did a lot for its country. It brought down a tyrannical regime, re-established hope, brought members of the community closer and opened a whole new can of worms in the form of CSR overload. With patriotism running through sour society’s veins, everybody – including the big corporations – wanted a little piece of ‘Rebuilding Egypt’. They too wanted to send out an important message at a very important time. They wanted to be seen as equally patriotic as the rest of us and there was only one way to do that! Yes, you guessed it.
Everybody jumped on the CSR bandwagon and before you knew it, hundreds of teenagers were out on the streets, with brooms in hand sweeping the dusty streets of Cairo or painting its sidewalks in black and white while donning company branded logos and overalls.
Pictures were taken and stories of these heroic companies were splashed across the newspapers. What these companies failed to acknowledge was that the impact of their efforts were only immediate and definitely not long lasting. It took less than a week before trash found its way back on to the streets and the brightly painted sidewalks were back to being grey.
Some companies didn’t bother to make any effort at all. They just plastered the Egyptian flag onto their ads with a few claims of being proud to be Egyptian and thought ‘There! I guess that should do it’. From manufacturers of crystal chandeliers to mobile service providers to fast food chains, every brand made some form of patriotic claim. The fact that the revolution was suddenly ‘in’ lured brands into becoming part of the trend and even international brands like Kenneth Cole wanted to cash in on the buzz by hijacking the Cairo hash tag on twitter and shamelessly announcing that its new Season’s collection was behind Egypt’s upheaval.
CSR or Corporate Social Responsibility is an underdeveloped concept in the Middle East, one that’s usually used interchangeably with ‘charity’ or ‘donations’. Because there is still no concrete understanding of how integrating CSR into a company’s business strategy can actually make a difference to the bottom line, CSR has taken the form of Cosmetic Social Responsibility. It has very little to do with developing communities and a lot more to do with self promotion. As one study mentions, CSR isn’t about pursuing the CEO’s pet interest or just taking your employees for a day out to the local orphanage. CSR is a much more holistic approach to business, which is designed to enhance corporate success because of its relevance, rather than because it represents something unconnected to an organization’s core business. It involves a business identifying its stakeholder groups and incorporating their needs and values within the strategic day-to-day decision-making process.
Unbeknownst to many companies, CSR can affect a company’s growth. As McWilliams and Siegel underline (2001), firms that are socially responsible are considered by consumers to have a good reputation. A further study conducted by British Telecom a year later (the interrelationship between CSR and reputation) confirmed that CSR represents 25% of the reputational asset of the company.
In a nutshell, CSR is an important business strategy because different stakeholders, from consumers to suppliers to employees and even NGOs, all want to deal with a company that they trust and respect. And by satisfying these different stakeholders, companies demonstrate their commitment to another important stakeholder – their investors – who, at the end of the day, benefit the most when the needs of these other stakeholder groups are being met.