Footnote:
Nach Informationen von SSRN wurde die ursprüngliche Fassung des Dokuments March 1, 2005 erstellt
Description:
Investment in corporate social initiatives is escalating in accordance with the increasing recognition of the vast potential of such initiatives. For example, although it represents only a small proportion of overall corporate expenditure on social initiatives, U.S. corporate spending on cause-related marketing jumped from $125 million in 1990 to about $ 828 million in 2002 (Porter and Kramer 2002). In today's era of marketing accountability, corporate managers urgently need to assess the returns to social initiatives to justify and sustain commitment of resources to social issues. Addressing this need, our research develops a framework to assess the social and business returns to corporate social marketing (CSM) and empirically tests the framework in the context of “Crest Healthy Smiles 2010” program supported by Proctor & Gamble. CSM is a strategy that uses marketing principles and techniques to foster behavior change in a target population, improving society while at the same time building markets for products or services (Kotler and Lee 2004). In other words, a CSM initiative strategically combines business agenda with a social need and thus provides a context to examine simultaneously the social and business returns