Understanding your audience to inform your CSR approach

So, how can brands practically navigate CSR and align their strategy and principles to a cause that will result in good for all sides?

Through research and analysis, we have laid out six steps to help you and your brand succeed in this area.

Before we get into the six step guide, let’s take a closer look at what CSR is and why it’s so important.

What is CSR?

Let’s talk about scale.

• The terms corporate social responsibility and CSR alone generate over 86,000 online mentions each month, and that conversation is growing.
• According to the Harvard Business Review, the Global 500 spend in excess of $20 billion per year on CSR initiatives.
• 90% of the largest companies are now filing sustainability reports ,while 80% of mainstream investors now consider ESG (environmental, social, and governance) information when making investment decisions.

All in all, this is a topic worthy of your attention, time, and effort.

So what about your audience and customers, and how do they come into play here? Let’s be clear: If you’re planning on embarking on a CSR initiative to increase profits and win more customers, you’re doing it for the wrong reasons. Yes, a well-thought out strategy will more than likely result in these benefits, but CSR is a way for corporations and brands to use profits for positive impact and change.

From a customer point of view, shallow initiatives will be easily identified and rejected. We don’t want to negatively call out brands, but you probably won’t find it hard to think of some.

Consumers are increasingly better informed and vocal about their purchasing and consumption behaviors, leading to more considered buying habits and more visibility on the brands that fail to meet the perceived mark.

Sites like the Ethical Consumer help to inform concerned customers on practices by brands that are deemed unethical. This affects entire industries – a simple search in relation to fast fashion will quickly reveal the level of consumer disgust, mistrust, and abandonment surrounding the sector.

But it’s not all doom and gloom. There are thousands of companies dedicating large chunks of their profit and intellect to helping make the world better.

Different types of CSR

The table below looks at the different types of CSR, but note that this list is non-exhaustive – there is no limit to the ways brands can give back.

The 6-step guide

You have the opportunity to do something that will reap real benefits for deserving causes.

If your company is serious about investing in CSR, the following sections are designed to help you think about the different aspects of a strong strategy.

1. Understand your audience

Hopefully this is something that you will already have in hand, but if not, let’s lay it out.

Your audience experiences the outputs of your company and brand, and your CSR efforts are a big part of that, so it’s imperative that you bring them into consideration when planning something that will be so visible.

There are a few different factors to consider.

1. Personas

It’s important to have a clear idea of who your different customers are and their demographic make-up. Having this information will allow you to analyze the potential effect or perception of your CSR initiative on your audience. You do not want to align your brand with something that doesn’t sit with the values of your customer personas.

If you’re not confident on the depth or accuracy of your current personas analysis there are countless guides that can help steer, including this one from Brandwatch.

2. Contextual factors

If you’re unsure of what cause is most pertinent to your brand, it is helpful to think about the different sociopolitical factors affecting your customers and audience.

What are the causes most relevant to them and is there a way your company can help or support them?

3. Moral influencers

Having an appreciation of the people that your customers currently look up to will help your brand identify the values and initiatives that strike merit with your audience. Obviously this is not a fool-proof analysis, but it is information helpful to guiding your understanding of how your audience will perceive any potential CSR efforts from your brand.

4. Relevant causes

Have you got an awareness of the people and causes that your audience follow and are (at least theoretically) influenced by? It is quite easy to understand the different types of groups your audience segments have an affiliation with, especially with tools like Brandwatch Audiences.

2. Know your brand

The following section may seem rudimentary, however it is essential to have an airtight understanding of your brand inside and out before embarking on any kind of CSR venture.

Answer the following questions:

1. What sector do you operate in?
2. What are your current brand morals and values? Are they clearly defined or could they do with some work?
3. What campaigns have you run recently? Has your brand previously been affiliated with a specific topic?
4. What is in the pipeline in terms of upcoming plans?
5. Who has previously been affiliated with your brand? What influencers have you worked with?
6. Have studies been done into your brand or has it been associated with any research?

With this information you have the foundation necessary to commit to a CSR initiative that aligns with your brand, past and present. Don’t forget that it’s imperative to drive a strategy from the outside in, so understanding your brand and the people that work within it is just as important as understanding your audience. More on this to come.

3. Stay relevant

It’s good to keep a degree of proximity between what your brand is currently selling and the initiative you ultimately choose to go with. At the very least, your campaign will have more weight since you’re known for having expertise in that area.

For example, McDonald’s choosing to support a charity dedicated to helping people combat fraud is worthwhile but doesn’t make a huge amount of sense given its sector, customers, and offering – there are more relevant causes they could get involved in.

If this can’t be the case then be sure to look at the full range of possible implications and perceptions associated with choosing a strategy that doesn’t necessarily relate to your brand or offering.

Knowing where you are now is good, but what about where your brand will be in five years? Or, more importantly, what factors might affect your brand in the next five years? A tried and tested model designed to help forecast in this way is PESTEL Analysis. It will help you get an idea of the macroeconomic factors that can have an effect on your business now and in the future.

CSR or no CSR, it’s a useful strategic tool for any brand.

Finally, you need to find out exactly what people think of you (not what you think they think).

Quite often, brands make the mistake of assuming they know what their customers think of them, when in reality perceptions could be very different. Taking a look from the outside in can uncover insights previously unknown to your team. There are a number of ways you can glean this information.

• Customer research – Speak directly to customers to understand what picture they have of your brand in their head.
• Social listening – Use tools like Brandwatch Analytics or Forsight to conduct online analysis of the mentions and conversations surrounding your brand. The benefit of this is that it’s mostly unbiased opinions.
• Surveys – Tools like Qriously launch surveys that directly poll defined audiences on pretty much anything, including what they think of brands.

With this information you can get a clear take on what you customers and audience actually think of your brand. This will help avoid decisions that are misaligned with your brand perception and ultimately give you the guidance needed to drive a strong strategy.

It should go without saying that this should be constantly monitored, as customer opinions can change instantly. The last thing your brand wants is to be in full steam ahead mode with a strategy and miss a change in tide. Real-time data and customer opinion monitoring can ensure you remain on the same page as your customers at all times.

4. Consider scale

While you may not yet have a fully formed plan relating to this section, it’s helpful to start thinking about the components and aspects over time. There are a few questions we would advise answering:

1. Is this a short term campaign or a long term, company-wide initiative?
2. If the latter, then what will the various touch points look like over the next 6, 12, or 18 months?
3. Is this a global or regional campaign? If global, does it need to be localized?
4. What departments need to be informed and involved?
5. How and when will it be rolled out internally?

The last thing you want is to do months or research and planning to create an impactful strategy that starts with a bang but sizzles out after a few months due to the lack of necessary buy-in and communication. We’ll discuss this more in the next section.

5. Identify levels of investment

Budget

Knowing what kind of budget is available will have a significant bearing on your planning.

Hopefully, the previous section will have given you an indication of the depth of the strategy and the timeline which will make budget allocation easier. Also consider future funding – what are the parameters in which additional funds will be released, and how will you measure the success of the strategy in order to canvas for a bigger budget?

Employees

This is arguably the most important section in the entire guide. A brand’s employees play a crucial role in the success of any CSR campaign.

Without genuine buy-in, you’re going to have a hard time driving the strategy and could potentially lose good staff. They should be considered from the very conception of any initiative. Your employees are typically the face of the brand, and they interact with customers and bring brand values to life. With this in mind, you need to know that they will be on board with any initiative and champion it at each and every relevant touchpoint.

Successful employee on-boarding can lead to increased retention and boost morale within the organization. To help ensure this successful on-boarding, there should be a thorough communication and education plan as well as feedback sessions at various points along your timeline. Just like those of your customers, employee perception of the brand is insight that should never be disregarded.

Employee buy-in should be celebrated and showcased as part of the strategy. However, Harvard Business Review cautions the way in which employee buy-in and incentives are positioned to ensure it is not linked to company profit.

Executive buy-in

Like most corporate strategies, top-down investment is essential to driving success. How involved will the top layers of the brand be and what will that support look like? Knowing the exact details around this will allow you to call on support and guidance when you need to most. It will also help drive the importance and validity of any initiative and hopefully boost widespread internal buy in.

Supply chain

The scale of your strategy will determine the importance of this section.

If your CSR strategy is going to affect your supply chain, then you need to know to what extent and also have a clear plan for communication, potential disruption, and education for the departments and employees that will be involved and affected by the change. A large scale change will merit external communication and signalling to the market and to customers.

Zara recently announced that it would make considerable updates to its supply chain processes in an effort to champion more ethical and sustainable practices and lower its impact on the environment.

Transparency

If you’re going to tie your brand to an issue, do it wholeheartedly.

Make sure your employees know what the campaigns are, when they are happening (especially key milestones within them), what the results are, and why it’s important for the wider business.

6. Have a contingency plan

Hopefully, having read this guide and after creating a solid strategy, you will have no use for this section. But, just in case, here it is.

Things may go wrong. For example, there may be a long-forgotten previous affiliation that contradicts your current position and is seen as ignorant by your customers.

If this or other issues come to light you need to have a plan in place that can help you minimize the damage. Know which department and people will need to be involved and what the rollout strategy will look like.

Crisis management guides can help you formulate something relevant. Obviously, the degree to which you need a plan will depend on the scale of your CSR strategy and the level of investment, not forgetting the extent of the backlash.

Summary

With the information gathered in the previous six sections you should have the necessary information to plan a strategy that makes sense for your brand and your audience.

Corporate social responsibility is something that every brand should consider. It’s a chance to positively impact people’s lives and make a difference in the world. Beyond this, it has the potential to deepen relationships with customers and create a workplace that people genuinely want to be a part of.