“Corporate Social Responsibility and Financial Performance: Does the Chief Marketing Officer Matter?” with Atanas Nikolov (Dissertation Essay 2)

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) have a multifaceted role with responsibilities that include gathering and interpreting market information, developing and managing relationships with customers and stakeholders, andidentifying investment opportunities in a firm’s market environment. As customers become more concerned about environmental and social issues, CMOs are well-positioned to aid in the effective implementation of CSR initiatives. This study posits that CMOs play a critical role in incorporating CSR into firm strategy and, thereby, helping firms reap financial benefits from CSR. The analysis utilizes a novel dataset comprising 700 firms over an eleven-year period (2001-2011). Results reveal that CMOs help firms reduce societal costs in domains most relevant to end-customers (product offerings), yielding the greatest payoffs to financial performance. This relationship is also influenced by factors that influence CMOs’ decision-making with respect to CSR, namely gender and compensation structure. While female CMOs have a greater effect on reducing societal costs than their male counterparts, CMOs compensated with a higher share of bonuses decrease societal costs, seemingly at the expense of societal benefits.

“Societal Benefits: A Brand Equity View on CSR Value” with Omar Rodriguez-Vila, Sundar Bharadwaj, and Ujwal Kayande (Dissertation Essay 3)

Prior work suggests that brand-level actions can influence the strength, favorability, and uniqueness of brand associations, thereby affecting Customer-Based Brand Equity. The literature explains the effect of these brand-level actions through the lens of brand benefits, which provide consumers with personal utility. For example, product claims are typically tied to performance associations, which communicate the brand’s ability to meet consumers’ functional needs. We posit that a brand’s societal benefits, related to its efforts in meeting societal needs, can also influence consumer behavior and customer-based brand equity. The current work seeks to show that CSR claims can enhance societal benefits, which can thereby increase consumer likelihood of choosing a brand. This work also examines the moderating effects of product category (vice and virtue) and corporate ability on the relationship between CSR claims, societal benefits, and consumer choice. In one of the few studies to explore the marketing implications of CSR on consumers in the developing world, we use a series of discrete choice experiments and secondary data collected from consumers in Brazil.