Do you know what is Corporate Social Identity? Read this article.

What is it about?

The adoption of the social aspect of corporate identity brings a substantial value in the domain of corporate branding and communication globally. Companies are focusing their efforts on conveying the differentiated identity to the stakeholders through their behaviour and organisations’ internal culture. In this perspective, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has recently been well acknowledged as one of the most important factors in the process of developing the corporate identity. The delivery of a socially constructed corporate identity enhances stakeholders’ image perception and determines their relationship with the company. The enhanced corporate image is the result of distinguishing the company from the competition by building an emotional connection with the stakeholders. The purpose of this article is to report on the prioritization of different corporate social identities (CSIs) by the banking sectors in India to endorse the corporate branding process. There were three major outcomes from this study. First, Indian banks institutionalise their credibility of corporate personality by maintaining the CSR principles and goals as the core elements of their corporate statements. Second, the CSI scores of different CSR initiatives indicate variations in the stakeholder prioritisation among different banks. The result shows that the public sector banks give the highest priority to the community-related CSR initiatives followed by environment and customer among others, whereas the private sector banks emphasise on customers as their top priority followed by environment and community. The overall score depicts the environment-related initiatives to be the highest priority, which follows customer, employees, community and suppliers. Third, the research indicates that the relationship between CSI disclosures and profitability is significant in India.

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Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

Photo by Ross Findon on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The social aspect of building corporate identity will help in the decision-making process for developing a strong social image through their websites. However, the results suggest that the banking sector should adopt a global standard of CSR reporting and strategic positioning of the social identities among the stakeholders in the value chain. The results are limited to only the Indian banking sector and can be validated and applied to other industries and cross-cultural contexts.

Perspectives