Kevin Lane Keller

Firms face increasing transparency and accountability as to how they operate and manage their brands in the marketplace. Much attention has been placed on if – and in what ways – brand owners are providing benefits to individuals, communities and society. Firms, in turn, are embracing corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives designed to enhance the social welfare of those whose lives are affected by a firm’s operations and to produce positive social outcomes. The success of a CSR initiative depends in large part on the benefits delivered to four key constituent groups: (1) beneficiary organizations; (2) the sponsoring firm engaged in CSR; (3) customers of the sponsoring firm; and (4) employees of the sponsoring firm. We incorporate insights from different disciplines to put forth a Net Benefits Scorecard (NBS) for CSR initiatives to suggest a means by which decision-makers can comprehensively assess both current and potential benefits from a CSR initiative for these four – and potentially other – important types of constituents. Such a quantitative assessment can help companies better understand the relative benefits of both existing and potential CSR initiatives to improve their selection, design, monitoring, implementation and ultimate impact, including on brand equity with stakeholders.

Although some studies have found the effect of advertising expenditures on perceived quality to be positive and significant, others have shown that, under certain circumstances, advertising expenditures do not impact perceived quality. This paper contributes to the literature on advertising-to-quality perceptions by drawing on the accessibility-diagnosticity model from consumer psychology to examine brand-, category-, and country-level moderators of the expenditures-quality effect. Utilizing a monthly dataset of 898 brands in 48 categories across more than four years, this study provides a comprehensive picture regarding the relationship between advertising expenditures and perceived quality.