Organisations spending CSR marketing budgets wrongly -expert
Implementation of CSR projects by companies is as complex as the publicity and promotion of the projects. Among many organizations, there is lack of clear understanding of what exactly CSR is as many organisations projects lack the CSR underlining principle of sustenability.
Assessing the usual TV and print publicity stunt associated with CSR projects among companies in Nigeria, Friday Okuwe, director, strategy and planning at SO&U believed that organizations are employing wrong and non impactful approach in presenting themselves as socially responsible.
According to him, organizations tend to look for easy-win activities such as mounting campaigns in the media especially TV to publicise and celebrate an immediate single CSR project, an action seen as mere and ego publicity stunt which does not create the necessary impact.
Okuwe who was speaking at the Brand Journalists Association of Nigeria, (BJAN) annual conference in Ibadan, Oyo State recently, advised organizations to shift from looking out for easy-win strategies or activities with direct commercial benefits. “To derive long term benefit, businesses need to take a more indirect route to creating value with corporate responsibility initiatives – and how key stakeholders react to those initiatives”.
Stating that most organizations are actually not putting adequate efforts in leveraging and marketing their core CSR initiatives, Okuwe said organizations can examine the impact of their previous CSR activities on the society and project the positive effect but regretted that most CSR initiatives are immediately leveraged through media relations – a few write-ups, media mention and coverage, magazine supplements.
Refering to published figures that between 2014/2015, about N37 billion was spent by 100 leading companies in various sectors, Okuwe said each company can assess the impact of its expenditure on the society and leverage it for publicity.
He said where most of the marketing/communication budgets are being spent are sponsorship properties and consumer engagement programmes – sometimes mistaken or presented as CSRs.
According to him, CSR programmes are strategic initiatives that should be integrated into the overall business strategy and brand communication programmes to build and reinforce overall brand equity.
The SO&U strategist therefore advised organizations to begin to set clearly defined CSR objectives that are linked to measurable business/brand objectives, set a defined annual budget for CSR initiatives and appropriately allocated into each of the respective components – donations, philanthropy, community initiatives and streamline CSR programmes to key initiatives that can create maximum impact and deliver the appropriate value to the business.
He also said organistions need to have a clearly defined strategy for leveraging and marketing its core CSR programmes and initiatives in a manner that creates and delivers measure value to relevant stakeholders – then allocate the appropriate budget based on the strategy. Also speaking, Abdul Imoyo, Head, Media Relations, Access Bank Plc said CSR is an emerging issue in this part of the world hence the pace of adoption by most organization is rather slow. “Clearly, most indigenous companies are not fully aware of the business value and benefits of doing corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility helps drive down costs of operation”.
This year’s BJAN conference focused on challenges and prospects of CSR in Nigeria: roles of organizations, government and the media.
In his speech, the chairman of BJAN, Goddie Ofose said this year’s conference is unique. “Choosing the theme for discussion was a tough one but when we arrived at engaging the industry on the challenges and prospects of implementing effective CSR in Nigeria, we realized we have hit the bull’s eye”. He said the nation is at the point where corporations have come to be seen as alternate governments due to the failure of successive administrations at Federal and State levels to effectively deal with the weakening infrastructure challenges.
Daniel Obi