Enhancing Social Sustainability via Branding Strategies among Personal Care and Cosmetics Customers: The Moderating Role of Brand Visibility

Abstract

Sustainability has existed since the day it was originated by the Brundtland Commission in the year of 1987. The term sustainability has been vaguely defined and it creates different interpretations. In line with today’s economic situation, organizations increasingly perceive sustainability as an opportunity for them to gain a competitive advantage. In the current era, most of the powerful brands aspire to achieve the same social goal; hence business leaders and marketers are now facing a problem in maintaining its social sustainability. Most studies investigate social sustainability goals from the perspective of business operations. Results from the field study involving 420 customers from six (6) premier shopping malls across Kuala Lumpur demonstrated evidence for construct validity and reliability based on the multiple regression analysis, the result of the study of this study shows that only the Branded House strategy and Halal strategy were proven to have significant relationship with social sustainability. In terms of testing the hypotheses involving the moderating roles of the relationship between independent variable and dependent variable, 2 out of 4 hypotheses were supported in which brand visibility moderates the relationship between Halal branding and social sustainability, whereas brand visibility moderates the relationship between stand-alone strategy and social sustainability The implications of this research are, the organization needs to consider corporate dominant strategy and Halal strategy to ensure long-term business operation and this research also provides additional insight on social sustainability model by investigating the branding strategies namely corporate dominant, brand dominant, mixed branding and Halal branding.