In today’s competitive environment, organizations are more concerned about their growth and competitiveness in the marketplace. Therefore, organizations are striving hard to involve corporate social responsibility in order to represent a positive image among the concerned stakeholders. This study seeks to understand the corporate social responsibility policies of the company and its impact on the brand image and reputation of the company. The Shell Company has been selected in order to understand the importance of CSR policy of an oil industry and its impact on the reputation and brand image of the company. Therefore, the data has been collected in the form of interviews from the managers of the Shell Company and society. This research study support that corporate social responsibility has a positive impact on the reputation of the and brand image of the company, help them in having better relationship with its stakeholders including customers and become more flexible in dealing with the uncertainties of the business environment in order to have competitive advantage. The company needs to put sincere efforts order to create awareness about its CSR in order to maintain and improve its reputation in the eye of its customers. The customers on their part must consider corporate social responsibility of the company while making their purchasing decision. The results suggest that the Shell Company’s management must incorporate corporate social responsibility while making marketing strategies because it influences the purchasing decision of the customers. The companies that ignore to incorporate corporate social responsibility in their marketing and communication strategies fail to build and maintain their good reputation in the eye of their customers.

Keywords:  Corporate social responsibility, brand Image, Customers’ perception

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1.Background

Today, in the business environment, a lot of challenges are faced by companies. There are higher concerns about the competitiveness and productivity of a company. Hence, Corporate Social Responsibility is gaining importance day by day. Corporate Social Responsibility is responsibility of an organisation towards citizens and to ensure compliance with the norms, standards, laws and ethics (Popoli, 2011). CSR aims at its major responsibility for the corporate actions. This in turn has positive impact upon the environment and the stakeholders including customers, suppliers, employees, investors, government and local communities. In this era of business world, the concept of serving the shareholders as a top most priority is fading away. Even the need of implementing CSR practices has been increased to a great extent, but companies do not give prime importance to the implementation of CSR practices (Werther and Chandler, 2005).

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In almost every industry, corporate social responsibility has become a need for companies because it helps companies in strengthening their brand image. Corporate social responsibility is considered to be a significant tool and used by companies for increasing their repute and value in business world. Despite of having various benefits of corporate social responsibility, companies do not consider it as a part of strategy. Positive association and the brand image can also be influenced by the Corporate Social Responsibility and they could be beneficial for the business’s other aspects as well (Blombäck and Scandelius, 2013). With the emergence of Corporate Social Responsibility there are certain other aspects of the business which got the attention too and they are investigated too those are consumer company fit, loyalty and community. In order to enhance the reputation of the organisation along with enhancing the brand image, the promotion of Corporate Social Responsibility is required from the organisations side. This can also be used to attract the quality employees towards the organisation. Effectively employing CSR would put the organisation far ahead its competitors in reputation as well (Nan and Heo, 2007). CSR is a holistic concept that covers all the aspects of the business and its relationship with the stakeholders especially the customers. This helps in building reputation of the organisation, improve brand image, and the positive customer perception about the brand. It further helps in attraction of loyal employees besides the loyal customers and hence improves internal strength of the organisation too (Du et al, 2010).

The corporations have to face various kinds of concerns which have been increasing on daily basis and in addition to this the involvemen