| A CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE ON STRATEGIC CSR AS A TOOL FOR MARKETING AND BRAND DIFFERENTIATION | | | Mattias Norén, Niklas Nygård | 2014-01-16 |

| “What are the underlying reasons for abusive Strategic CSR in marketing and brand differentiation, what are the consequences and are there any solutions?”

Introduction to CSR
For Corporate social responsibility(CSR) a lot of different definitions exists but the one we chose to use in this report was defined by (McWilliams, Siegel och Wright)) as “actions that appear to further some social good, beyond the interests of the firm and that which is required by law”. This definition defines a wide concept that contains everything from corporate environmental strategies, employee empowerment, health and benefit plans for employees and corporate philanthropy. The linking factor between these different implementations is that corporations and businesses should expand their responsibility beyond absolute necessity and their core stakeholders group. While CSR is very modern as a defined concept it is still based on a lot of old ideas. For example many companies in the late 1800s based its business on scientific betterment which often meant that employee benefits was taken a lot further than the requirements of the law (Barley och Kunda). Today CSR has evolved to something more than the initial idea of expanded responsibility and it’s used as a tool for companies to reach goals outside of areas normally connected to CSR, for example financial and growth goals. This type of implementation when CSR is used to create value both from a business and a social perspective is often called strategic CSR.
Introduction to marketing and brand differentiation with CSR
One example of Strategic CSR is when companies use CSR to differentiate their business from their competitors’ through marketing of their supposedly good