Last week, my fellow blogger, Susan Gunelius, highlighted the 2010 Social Responsibility Branding Survey. This shows that consumers want transparent, honest, socially responsible brands, with 75% of consumers supporting socially responsible businesses and 55% preferring socially responsible products.
Digging through the report there are further figures which deserve to be highlighted within the context of improving CSR websites.
For starters, despite this high preference for socially responsible companies and products, only 11% of consumers report having heard a CSR message from any company in the past year, and only 13% have ever read the CSR content of a corporate website.
This shows beyond any doubt that companies are not communicating their social responsibility credentials as well as they could be, especially with 50% of consumers prepared to pay a premium of at least 5% for socially responsible products.
However probably the most telling statistic is that of that 13% who have read a company’s CSR website, 75% were then more likely to buy that company’s product over a competitor’s.
The overarching message of these figures cannot be denied:
- customers want to hear the message of social responsibility from companies about the products they buy
- customers are prepared to pay an extra premium to ensure they buy socially responsible products
- customers are 75% more likely to buy the products of a company whose CSR website they have read
With only 13% of customers having visited a CSR website, this leaves a huge untapped market for companies to promote their online CSR content to. It almost makes you wonder why more of them don’t.
Picture Credit: Do something good every day by HowardLake from flickr under Create Commons Attribute Share Alike License.
Lucy is Editor at Corporate Eye
