As a result, companies are increasingly expected to address the CSV issue and have a great deal of scope to improve the quality of life for the world’s poor. Despite powerful incentives, a unique capacity to foster large-scale societal change and enormous potential to develop inclusive growth with cost-effective societal strategies to address poverty and inequality (Kaplan et al. 2018), many companies are not fully exploiting this potential and should be aware of the various opportunities specific to their sectors. A study was conducted by Laurent (2017)11 on the state of the sustainable development issue, an opportunity that amounts to billions of dollars. The estimated value of the 60 business opportunities identified is $12.1 trillion per year by 2030. These opportunities would contribute to the achievement of the 17 UN global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the areas of food and agriculture, cities, energy and materials, and health and well-being (see Table 2.1).
To broaden the scope of possibilities, CSR managers should evaluate all the options offered by three areas to build a competitive societal mission strategy that will lead to a competitive advantage for the company (Bharadwaj and Rodriguez-Vilá 2018). The first is “a brand heritage study to identify the most important benefits the brand offers to help them identify the societal needs that the brand can meet”. For example, the Dove brand was not sold as a soap product, but as a beauty product. Putting beauty first is therefore at the heart of the brand’s value proposition. It is logical that the brand should focus on societal needs relating to the perception of beauty. The second area concerns “consumers and the difficulty of identifying in an exhaustive way the societal issues to which they are attuned”. The company needs to focus on the “cultural tensions” that affect consumers and relate to the brand’s heritage. These tensions may, for example, be “preserving the core of the brand attributes that have formed its identity to date, while reinforcing it with tangible societal attributes”. The brand then becomes relevant to consumers when it provides solutions to these tensions. The third area concerns “product or industry-related externalities”. This involves identifying the indirect costs incurred or benefit obtained by a third party (Gasmi and Grolleau 2003), arising from the production or use of the company’s branded products. A company can thus build an effective corporate mission strategy by choosing one of these areas. However, taking all three areas into account can offer real opportunities for CSV. There are two conditions for a successful CSV-based societal process. The first condition is to develop social and/or environmental innovations capable of capitalizing on the opportunities they will produce. The second is to turn a societal cause into a competitive advantage, so CSR project managers must fight against two types of obstacles which they may encounter. The first is the difficulty of changing goals after this societal mission has been chosen, because its success depends on the legitimacy of the company. Changing commitment, or delivering an inconsistent message, can be perceived by stakeholders in the socio-political sphere and the market as an incongruous act, because according to Tirole (2009), the company may be seen as an entity that seeks to buy “free” “social prestige” to show its generosity to these stakeholders. The second obstacle is associated with the appeal of the idea of “doing good”, which may distract CSR managers from the brand’s essential needs. Turning a societal cause into a competitive advantage always attracts criticism, which has both supporters and opponents. CSR managers must therefore assess whether the relevant stakeholders are willing to accept and support societal strategies based on CSV. Thus, depending on their expectations, there may be four potential situations. One is related to stakeholders who react negatively and do not support the company’s societal strategy. This attitude may be the source of three factors: a gap between the message communicated by the brand and that practiced by the company (Gasmi 2014), a politicization of the message and a mistrust of the company’s motivation. This is the case with companies in the food industry that are often criticized by consumers, parents, NGOs, etc., for their contribution, through some of their products, to the increase in the rate of obesity among children. The other three situations may, for example, concern the Nike group which, in the 1990s, developed a policy of outsourcing its production activities to low-cost countries, especially in Asia (Gasmi and Grolleau 2005). Thus, the first situation corresponds to the stakeholders who benefit from the outsourcing strategy and are relatively unconcerned about the ethical consequences, including consumers, shareholders, workers and outsourcing countries, as well as competitors. These stakeholders value the choice of outsourcing, putting ethical considerations on the back burner for the benefit of the company, allowing it to make private economic profit. The second situation represents the soft power players (NGOs, etc.) who are particularly sensitive to the ethical consequences of Nike’s strategic choices. Finally, the third concerns public authorities and workers in the countries where the subcontracting is taking place. These actors remain at a distance from the ethical choices made by the multinational for different reasons, essentially based on considerations of lesser harm for some and of attractiveness and economic development for others. The public authorities of some Asian countries are happy to welcome foreign companies that provide their workers with jobs and salaries. The vulnerability of the workers employed, along with their demographic and cultural profile, makes them more conciliatory and less demanding with regard to the ethical problem; moreover, alternative job offers are very limited and the workers are at great risk of exploitation (Gasmi and Grolleau 2005). Workers and public authorities may even defend the notion of low costs in order not to compromise their competitive advantages, thus encouraging these companies to invest in their country to promote their economic development. All categories of stakeholders show that a societal cause is unlikely to escape criticism, and CSR managers must set themselves a goal so that the defenders of the societal mission outnumber those that oppose it.
Certainly, CSV-based societal strategies can have a positive effect on the legitimacy of a company’s activities by reducing negative externalities or generating positive externalities while improving its competitive advantage. But the key factor of “competitive advantage” is only effective if customers perceive and consider both intangible (collective benefit) and tangible (individual private benefit to the customer) social and/or environmental attributes as an element of product differentiation and integrate them into their purchasing act. The appropriation of these attributes is not an intrinsic value for customers, as it depends on the level of their attention to CSR practices and their labels as management tools, in order to make inferences about these tools to differentiate the “societal products” that should correspond to their expectations. Labels, attention and appropriation therefore play a decisive role in the purchasing act.
2.4.1. Labels, a tool for managing the appropriation of CSR as differentiating attributes
Societal attributes are based on the notion of trust (trust attributes), and the differentiation strategy that they can play raises questions about the asymmetry of information to which the customer may be exposed when making a purchase. Trust attributes have the peculiarity that they are practically never verified by the buyer before or after the purchase (Nelson 1970; Darby and Karni 1973). From this perspective, the social or environmental label, as a management tool linked to societal innovations, can reduce this asymmetry of information. A management tool corresponds to “any sign, technique or local and elementary know-how
