Importance of personal trust in the success of CSR and sustainability.

The trusts make the customer believe the endeavors of the organization. It is the soft value which is hard to earn by the organization. It is an intangible asset. The trust comes with the legacy and enhances the brand image of the organization. Generally, in context of CSR people tend to trust the government entities more than the business corporation (Thiel, 2016). But often trust creates a biasness and if the biasness is positive, it favors and supports the CSR activities of the organization otherwise it dampens the organizational investment in CSR and sustainability. The trust could be seen a kind of the reciprocation done by the individual towards the organization financial and non-financial activities. The individual trust enhances the word of mouth marketing and referral for the organization.

The social networking behemoth Facebook was doing well, capitalizing in customer trust but the discloser of data breach where the personal information of its users was sold to the research firm, “Business Analytica” breaches the psychological contract its users had with it. These negatively influence the socio-economic domain of CSR and sustainability. Facebook stock price declined, and company lost billion dollars in just a week. The inability of the company to build up the trust with customers are making the company to lose the customers at the alarming rate. (Campanella, 2017).

But sometimes the company has to battle hard to come across and concertized its customer trust. The first trillion-dollar company of the world; Apple, once got into the battle of philosophy with the government of the USA. The company took the stand on the privacy of its customer information and revoked the government request to unlock the phone(the customer had criminal charges of mass shooting in San Bernardino, California). Though this is an exception and extreme cases, most of the time the companies’ investment to build the trust payoff. The public trust towards the cooperation has a significant positive impact in the CSR, it increases the corporate financial performance and corporate social performance (Boulouta, 2013). Similarly, as per the research conducted by social invest, the customers also want to engage in the CSR and 76% of the customer wants to donate for philanthropy, the company they trust (Social Investement, 2015).

Bibliography

Boulouta, I. (2013). The role of ‘public trust in corporations’ in CSR strategies which deliver value for both business and society. 4th Annual Conference in Political Economy.

Campanella, N. (2017, October 30). Customer Support in the Trust Economy: The Importance of CSR. Retrieved from www.getcrm.com: https://getcrm.com/blog/importance-of-csr/

Social Investement. (2015, June 12). CSR, what is the impact on consumers? Retrieved from www.blog.optimy.com: https://blog.optimy.com/csr-impact-consumers/

Thiel, M. (2016). The Social Domain in CSR and Sustainability: A Critical Study of Social Responsibility among Governments, Local Communities and Corporations. New York: Routledge.