Csr Strategy of Sport Industry
Investors They expect returns on investment. They are usually less concerned by CARS and more by financial results. Any decision made has to convince them of the long-term interest of taking that action. Employees They earn the money from the company. A specificity of the sport industry is the tight relationship employees usually have with the brand they are working for. There is a strong hare of values. Community Every brand has to keep up in line with the values of the community. They must ensure the reputation of the brand by following good ethical behavior.
Events Organizer / Committees It represents a complex mutual relation. Events need the brands to bring money wrought sponsorship, but also quality products to ensure quality show while brands need events for exposure and show their strength. Clubs / Athletes As for events, brands will associate its image with clubs or athletes. When taking CARS decisions, it has to respect the values of these stakeholders to avoid conflicts. Competitors When positioning against competitors, CARS can be use as marketing tool.
Governments Local and national government body are major actors in any strategic decision for brands. No’s No’s represent a good way to show concern on social topic for brands. 2. Pros and Cons of CARS for stakeholders Before entering into any CARS strategy for a sporting good brand, it is important to estimate the impact it can possibly have on your stakeholders. First of all lets consider the main positive effects. On the one hand, CARS as a general Cars Strategy of Sport Industry By relish and the brand. It is also a good tool to increase the community base with deeper and stronger values.
Though it has to be consider that a strong positioning can sometimes have the opposite effect with customers no longer identifying with the brand values. On the second hand, social responsibilities are a good way to motivate your employees and thus increase your production and/or quality. It has a positive impact on the unity of all your members and helps create a healthier working environment. This is also a positive way to increase the attractiveness of your company through fair hiring process and rewarding treatments.
Moreover, CARS can increase the company reputation. This will positively impact the business with suppliers but also with governments, event organizers, committees and athletes. Not only these actors will be more willing to work with you, but also your existing partners will benefit from your positive reputation. Nonetheless, even though sport industry share generally the same big values, a strong positioning can once again result in conflicts with potential partner and needs to be taken into consideration.
Nonetheless, CARS cannot only affect positively the entire group of stakeholders. Among the main stakeholders concerned about CARS are the investors. Social Responsibility is broadly understood as spending money and not earning return on investments. And these cost matters get more important when considering medium and small enterprises. Program to reduce environment impacts for example are costly, the same when it comes to relocating decisions. Discussing all possible positive and negative impacts on stakeholders isn’t possible.
Sport industry is a complex structure and the tight links between companies and their stakeholders makes every CARS decision even more important regarding their impact on many stakeholders at the same time. More than in any other industry, CARS are deeply value driven and should reflect the consumer values. Hence it requires to take into consideration all possible impact and strong risk analysis. 3. Risk analysis The prime purpose of including CARS in corporate business is to make the corporate equines activities as well as the corporate culture economically, socially and environmentally sustainable.
It seems the customer satisfaction is only about price and service, but concentrating on only these aspects of business makes them blind folded towards other important changes taking place worldwide that could blow the business out of the water. Some of the drivers pushing business towards CARS include: Inefficiency of the Government In the past, governments have relied only on legislation and regulation to deliver social and environmental objectives in the business sector that has led to certain
There is a growing demand for corporate disclosure from stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, employees, communities, investors, and activist organizations. Increased Customer Interest It has been seen and proved through a survey conducted found that more than one third of surveyed consumers believed that large companies “should do more than give money to solve problems. ” Increased pressure from the Investor Investors are changing the way they analyze companies’ performance, and are making decisions based on ethical concerns too.
Change in employee behavior Employees are increasingly looking beyond paychecks and benefits and seeking out employers whose operating practices match their own principles. In order to hire and retain skilled employees, companies are being forced to improve working conditions. CARS and risk management CARS, particularly for a global company, is related to corporate risk management through two means: by providing intelligence about what those risks are, and by offering and effective means to respond to them.
The key to both, as implied in the above definition, is more effectively “managing stakeholder relationships. ” Stakeholder engagement through CARS programs provides an invaluable source of information about social risks, which is different from simply stakeholder managing. A stakeholder management mind-set focuses the dissemination of information to stakeholders, through public relations or community relations, on decisions already made without completing the feedback loop. This way of managing stakeholders might be ineffective in global operating environments.
Managing stakeholder relationships requires closing the loop; it means truly engaging stakeholders. For any company, only few stakeholders may warrant reaching the highest level of engagement, but managing stakeholder relationships is a key dimension of effective CARS programs for all global companies. Effectively managing stakeholder relationships focuses on issues, problems and opportunities that go far beyond one organization and involve the whole global systems or network.
By integrating the business sensing, learning and innovations gained from CARS programs, companies can better manage their risks and subsequently their economics, social and environmental impacts, in a manner that is roughly analogous to what they learn from their customers, a more well-established form of business intelligence adhering. Generally, companies consider implementing responsibility systems too expensive and besides they can even lead to a number of disadvantages compared to their competitors.
In fact, the cognitive assumption is that higher levels of responsibility will add to unrecoverable costs, because the costs related to an irresponsible corporate behavior are often hidden or unrecognized while the apparent benefits of cutting corners sometimes seem obvious. And environmental problems that in the past. Organizations therefore have to try to follow socially orientated aims, ranging from the protection of the environment as ell the worker’s rights in order to make the economical rule fit the social one.
The interesting socially responsible investment is part of the CARS. It has led to the growth and popularity of investment funds claiming to invest in companies that are socially responsible, and to the growth in the number of enterprises that provide information to investors about the social to environmental performance of companies. This has increased opportunities for trade unionists to obtain leverage over corporate behavior though means such as introducing shareholder resolutions at annual company meeting. Benchmark analysis Before undertaking any kind of CARS action, it important for sporting goods companies to be aware of the different issues existing in the sector and define the priority according to the corporate strategy. According to literature review, 3 mains axes have been define for CARS: environment, economic and society. The environment section is probably the most important for the outdoor sport enterprise as it is strongly related to the main concern of the industry. This section includes , preservation of resources such as water, air and soil.
The economic axes deal with the salary of employees and the involvement in the payment of taxes to the community. In addition, the economic responsibility of a company is to provide adapted products that respond to the need of customers, and make profit. The third dimension deals with society: employees’ wellbeing and respect of human rights. CARS actions are understood differently among companies and the operation showed by the main players will respond according to diverse values and priorities. A. Charity: Some outdoor sport brands are helping homeless people by providing apparel to rooter these people against rain, wind and keep them warm.
Volcano launched a campaign to distribute old pair of Jeans all across America. They collected it from customers in store. This action allowed the customers to be directly involved and have a very positive impact. Similarly, the Canadian brand Racketeer created weatherproof Gore Tex cape to distribute to homeless. B. Environment friendly In the outdoor industry, respect of environment is a strong value. Patagonia is probably the brand the most invested in the protection of environment and very concerned about reducing it carbon print.
The company tries to spread their vision about the overcompensation the western society is facing. In November 2013, they to make people buying only what they need. The company is also very transparent on its supply chain and the origin of their raw material. C. Education and improvement of society The CARS actions undertaken by The North Face have for objective to educate young kids and transmit them value of the respect of the environment. In addition, their program “explore the fund” increases access to nature and backcountry to children that may not have this opportunity without this program.
The most important concern for consumer in the outdoor industry is the respect for the environment. In fact, evolving outside, it mandatory for participants to respect nature. According to the 3 dimensions we have define before, a sporting good company can: Environment Make sure to have a echo friendly supply chain and try to limit your carbon print among your different operation Economic Pay taxes to the local community regarding environment regulation. Invest in R&D to develop products involved with a recycling process Society Try to educate people regarding environmental issues
To conclude, we will advise a sporting good company to undertake CARS action on environment protection, and choose the dimension (environment, economic or society) in which the company prefers to operate according to its values. 5. CARS actions to engage Through many company websites, especially sports ones in this case, we observe an increasing trend on communicating the engagements companies are taking. A special section is reserved to CARS explaining the roots of it and the future achievements they have in mind. As a general trend we see the protection of the environment on almost every website, whether Nikkei, Aids, lotto or puma.
For instance, Nikkei interestedly named its environmental engagement the “North Star” with the following table as a guideline: Another major point is to improve working conditions in global supply chains and the industry as a whole. Mainly, the goal is to help build an equitable and empowered work force. The way to do so is by giving work empowerment, a more efficient management system and sustainable manufacturing and sourcing. Moreover, something particular to sports is the concept of community, and Nikkei understood that point very well, that is why we see a strong involvement in the latter since they feed this industry.
