The impact of CSR and public platforms on corporate marketing communication

Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Business economics - Marketing, Corporate Communication, CRM, Market Research, Social Media, grade: C, The ESC Rennes School of Business, language: English, abstract: Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an increasingly important element when stakeholders' make their decisions about enterprises and their products. Currently, most companies still stay on the situation of one-way communication. It is the lack of effective two-way communication between companies and stakeholders that makes a win-win condition hardly be achieved.

As the number of netizens and smart phone users increases dramatically. Public platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Flickr, and Sina Weibo have play an important role in marketing communications. To combine corporate social responsibility with public platform is a new way to improve the brand image, as well as promote products or services. But at the same time, public platform has its uncertainties, on the one hand, too much emphasis on CSR may make customers' attention focused on CSR rather than their products or services; On the other hand, whether the direction of discussion on public platforms is positive or negative is hard to control.

This paper aims to shed light on corporate practices regarding the integration of CSR into corporate communication on public platforms. It uses case study method, selects representative CSR activities of three companies, and figure out whether the combination of CSR and public plat forms have an impact on their corporate marketing communication, and how the mentioned combination influence marketing communication.

Then this paper summarizes the characteristics of the communication on public platforms, and reaches the conclusion that public platform can help CSR achieve better marketing communication results. In the end, it proposes how to choose public platforms according to different circumstances, and pointed out that in order to achieve the purpose of CSR activities, it is necessary to transfer the focus of discussion from CSR to products, and formulate strategies to lead positive communication.