Understanding the Stickiness of Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting as a Post Globalization Digital Marketing Strategy: A Study of Multinational Automobile Companies in India

Abstract

Digital Marketing Initiatives of Firms are considered as one of the most influential marketing strategies of corporates to maximize the benefits of their businesses. One of the marketing approaches of businesses to find sophisticated ways of linking social and business values at individual and stakeholder level is through Corporate Social Responsibility ( CSR) reporting on websites. There is a “mad” race to promote CSR in order to enhance corporate visibility towards societal welfare. The objective of this paper is to evaluate whether there are elements of stickiness in CSR reporting as published in the websites of multinational automobile companies in India. Basically, Stickiness refers to a site’s ability to retain users and drive them further into a site5 . This paper takes into consideration four elements of stickiness as conceived by Gillespie, Krishna, Oliver, Olsen, and Thiel 15 . Comprising four broad components, they suggest that stickiness drivers in a website are content, customization, real-time interaction, and site promotion. The methodology adopted in this paper is thematic analysis of the CSR reporting of major (according to Forbes ranking) multinational automobile companies in India. The findings from this paper would suggest: firstly, whether all the four elements as proposed by Gillespie, Krishna, Oliver, Olsen and Thiel are prevalent in websites of these companies; secondly, the parameters that are more prominent among the automobile companies; thirdly other parameters (if at all) to be taken into consideration in order to enhance the stickiness of CSR Reporting. Keywords: Automobile Companies, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), Digital Marketing, Stickiness, Websites