There is a focus on every level, within a business, to support brand growth and satisfaction of customer and shareholder expectations. However, this can be a challenge, when you consider how best to promote a brand, and build up its profitability. There is a fine line between when to cut corners to save money, or when to push the envelope to drive success, and when a brand goes too far and ultimately ostracizes the target audience through their actions. This is visible in all four of the articles reviewed. In each case, businesses are evolving to meet changing consumer demands in the best way possible, while pushing the envelope in order to walk the tightrope between corporate social responsibility and corporate financial stability.
First, Google Says It’s Cracking Down on Bad Ads, recognizes the need to protect consumers from false advertising, this can be exactly paralleled with the second article, regarding Facebook’s changing of news reporting to try to avoid the sharing and replication of false news. These both demonstrates corporate social responsibility, and a business making changes to its work and environment and product standards in order to both protect and meet the customers’ expectations. As is cited form Jones, “social responsibility serves shareholders” (Jones 2015, p.80). This means that these changes not only increase the responsibility, but also profitability of the brand. In this case, changing what the customers are seeing is not only responsible, but also offers consumers a superior product, which means higher customer loyalty and better sales.
However, the P&G related article shows the opposite of this. The brand pushed the envelope in order to make claims that their product was superior, but crossed the line into irresponsibility, making claims that were unjustified and unsupportable. As such, they damaged the relationship with consumers, hurt their brand reputation, and suffered loss of income by acting irresponsibly. This still supports the idea that social responsibility supports profitability. This is why having experts, as hired by Facebook for their VR platform is so important. Because it offers an expert to protect everyone’s best interest at each critical stage. This will include advertising, and news reporting or press releases, which should be used to target the ideal market, without misleading them, at every step of the way. This will, in the long run, allow the launching of the new product to be successful, while also preserving the integrity of the Facebook brand.
References:
Associated Press. (2017). Facebook takes aim at fake news with new ‘trending’ formula. The Boston Globe, Retrieved from https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2017/01/25/facebook-takes-aim-fake-news-with-new-trending-formula/INq2pZXG4inZ6HI5z2kiMO/story.html
Coolidge, A. (2017). P&G modifies ad claims on Pampers. USA TODAY . Retrieved from http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2017/01/25/pg-modifies-ad-claims-pampers/97064760/
“Google says it’s cracking down on bad ads” (2017). Fast Company Retrieved from https://news.fastcompany.com/google-says-its-cracking-down-on-bad-ads-4029357
Issac, M. & Wingfield, N. (2017). Facebook’s virtual reality business gets a new leader. New York Times Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/26/technology/facebook-virtual-reality-hugo-barra.html?_r=0
Jones, G. R. (2015). Essentials of contemporary management (6th ed.). Boston: McGraw-Hill/Irwin.
