Corporate Social Responsibility, Marketing Strategic Leverage And Value Creation

Corporate social responsibility gets more and more attention from the researchers, the public community, enterprise managers and policy makers because of a series of increasingly serious problems, such as environmental pollution, ecological destruction, food safety, and lack of social morality and so on. Through continuous participation in cash donations, material donations, green marketing, cause-related marketing, public services of employees and other social responsibilities, enterprises are more and more convinced, corporate social responsibilities are not only the "right thing to do", but also the "smart thing to do". However, can corporate social responsibility create value for these enterprises? academic scholars also do not give a convincing answer to this question due to complexity of the relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate value creation. Some research suggests that corporate social responsibility is positively correlated with value creation, some suggests a negative correlation between the two, while other suggests a curve relationship between the two.Based on discussion and summarization of the related literatures, this paper argues that, on the one hand, the complicated relationship between corporate social responsibility and enterprise value creation is due to previous research limited to a single stakeholder, on the other hand, this complication also depends on certain condition or situation of contingency factors. Therefore, the research perspective about "Can corporate social responsibility create value for enterprises?" should rise to "How do corporate social responsibility create value for enterprises?". Because of this background, the research problem of this paper can be summarized as:Firstly, can corporate social responsibilities affect enterprise's value creation? In other words, can corporate social responsibility actions get positive response from the enterprise stakeholders? Secondly, from the perspective of enterprise' internal marketingstrategy leverage, what is the difference of the influence of corporate social responsibility to the enterprise value creation for enterprises with different advertising spendings, R&D investment and marketing capability.Based on the above background, this article analyzes the relationship between corporate social responsibility and enterprise value creation from two aspects in response to the above mentioned issues. On the one hand, based on double perspective of the product market and capital market, this study analyzes the market competition effect and market value effect of corporate social responsibility in response to the research problem about "Can corporate social responsibility create value for enterprises?". on the other hand, this study further investigate how does marketing strategy leverage (advertising, r&d and marketing capability) affect market competition and market value effect of corporate social responsibility in response to the research problem about "How do corporate social responsibility create value for enterprises?".Based on the stakeholder theory and resource-based theory, this paper integrates the marketing and organizational behavior and strategy related research, and tests this framework with secondary data sets selecting listed companies of A-shares from 2010 to 2013 as research samples. First of all, based on the empirical test of product market, we find that corporate social responsibility can significantly improve enterprise' relative product market growth within the industry, namely, corporate social responsibility can exert the strategic effect in the product market competition. From the perspective of the moderating effect of marketing strategy leverage, Advertising spending exert a significant moderating effect between corporate social responsibility and enterprise' future product market growth. For R&D investment, R&D investment does not play the strategic role of corporate social responsibility in the product market competition, instead extrude the market competition effect of corporate social responsibility. Marketing capability engenders a significant positive moderating effect between corporate social responsibility and enterprise' future product market growth, this evidence suggests that marketing capability can promote the strategic effect of corporate social responsibility in the product market competition.Secondly, based on the empirical test of capital market, We find that there is no significant relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate market value (Tobin's q), this conclusion shows that corporate social responsibility does not directly affect the enterprise's market value. It also illustrates that the relationship between corporate social responsibility and market value is not yet clear. From the perspective of the moderating effect of marketing strategy leverage, although corporate social responsibility does not directly affect the enterprise's market value, we find that corporate social responsibility can positively influence the enterprise's market value under the condition of certain investment in advertising, R&D and marketing capability. In addition, we further investigate the relationship between corporate social responsibility and the product market competition, the market value under the condition of different property rights attribute, We find that the property rights attribute engenders a significant negative moderating effect between corporate social responsibility and product market competition, the market value, and compared with the state-owned enterprises, the marketing strategy of leverage (advertising, R&D and marketing capability) of private enterprises can exert a more efficiently market value effect of corporate social responsibility.