Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility And Its Seven Strategies

The rapid development of business and economy has brought about increasingly serious social and environmental issues. As the basic economic units of society, companies should take the responsibility to solve these problems. The international corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement and all forms of CSR rankings require companies to pay more attention to CSR. This means that companies should give consideration to both economic and social objectives in order to keep sustainable development. In recent years, the performance of CSR in China has increased, but compared to those in Europe and North America, gaps still exist. This situation has brought not only serious negative influence to the sustainable and harmonious development of China's economy, but also tremendous pressure for China's companies to participate in international competition. In the fierce global economic competition, shaping a good image of CSR has become an important way for companies to build core competitiveness and form comparative advantages. However, most of the companies in China view CSR as a burden instead of opportunity. They take social responsibilities because of cause impulse or external pressure. They rarely raise CSR to a strategic level and their methods of implementing CSR are very obsolete and lack of innovation. This is due to that the public has a misperception of the relationship between companies and society and that companies lack pertinent theories and methods for guidance.This article introduces the right perception of the relationship between companies and society, analyzes the interaction between them and advises that companies should shift from reactive CSR to strategic CSR. Because a company does not have enough ability and resources to solve all the social issues, it should choose to address the issues which have intersections with its business, to find the shared value, and leave the rest of the issues to other organizations with comparative advantages such as companies in other industries, NGOs and governments. After analyzing and summarizing a large number of strategic CSR cases, this article puts forward a set of strategies for the implementation of CSR including cause marketing strategy, value chain strategy, stakeholder strategy, value proposition strategy, alliance strategy, event strategy and cooperation strategy. These seven strategies will provide inference and guidance for future CSR practice.