[Video Link for Email/Other Subscribers - 44.5min]
To be most effective, corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives must be intimately connected to the corporate brand. They must reinforce a company’s unique identity and be an integral part of how a business tells its story. In this session, Kellie McElhaney of UC Berkeley and one of the world’s leading experts on CSR strategy, offers seven principles and a detailed process for helping you develop a CSR strategy that is authentic because of its natural linkage to your company’s mission, vision, and values, and delivers significant, quantifiable, bottom-line benefits. Cause marketing case studies included from Pedigree, Dove, Starbucks, Haagen-Dazs, and Unilever.
While Kellie speaks of CSR in cause championing and marketing terms throughout the presentation, she’s also referring to sustainability at large. Naturally, there’s a lot of things a company can do to be more socially & environmentally responsible (if you’ve been reading this blog - yes, you know this!). But hey, the public knows or perceives a brand for its products and services. That’s all we have mindspace for. If you think of Campbell’s, there’s soup. Allstate is insurance. IKEA is furniture (although their cafeteria can be pretty memorable too!). You get the drift, and this applies for B2B brands too, be it Cargill, Halliburton, or SAP.
Point: If brands want to connect with the public and customers on the good work they’re doing, make sure it’s tied to the brand’s mission. Otherwise, it won’t resonate and it’s a waste of communication and program dollars, which could effectively be used someplace else. Now, Kellie isn’t saying that a variety of philanthropy programs that aren’t tied to the brand are irresponsible. Who could argue against giving money for cancer research or education 
Citizenship reporting is good, but that’s primarily for stakeholders, activists, business intellectuals, and so on. It’s not something the 99.99% super majority of the rest of the world could care about in their very limited brand awareness and interaction time.
Listen through, there’s a powerful message underneath. If you read Kellie’s book “Just Good Business”, she also makes a reasonable case about this regarding finance and long term return on investment: Programs that aren’t tied to a brand’s mission are generally more likely to be cut in funding in hard times. If we want to maximize our returns on social/environmental good that people can relate to, then from an investment standpoint it’s only wise to be focused
