That CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) thing! [Source: Business Today, May 8, 2005] It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Indian companies have just discovered the marketing pay-off of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. They could get by with focusing on real or perceived product attributes, and with profit-mindedness being considered a coarse sentiment, any CSR programme they launched was far removed from their core businesses, brands, even consumers. There has been a spate of corporate CSR initiatives over the past few years. Companies have been quick to respond to crises (such as the Gujarat earthquake or the Tsunami that hit the southern part of the country) or shown inherent goodness in plugging gaps in the government’s efforts to provide healthcare and education to all – in a country as vast as India, there will always be gaps – but there has been little effort to link such work to things such as marketing, even corporate strategies. Most CSR activities are, at best, charity, not very different from discrete acts of philanthropy and, at worst, a mere humane façade of a for-profit-only capitalist system. This is why recent advertising campaigns by the country’s two largest fast moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies, Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL) and ITC are significant. The first, a campaign for Surf Excel Quick Wash with the tagline Do bucket paani ab rozana hai bachnai (I will save two buckets of water a day), has struck a chord in a country where the shortage of water is an endemic phenomenon. “We decided it would be of immense benefit to a household if a technology could be developed that would reduce the water consumed in the washing of clothes and the amount of effort required while rinsing while delivering superlative cleanliness”, says an HLL spokesperson. Surf’s sales, say sources in the market, have gone up by as much as 15% since the advertisement, starring actress-turned-social-activist and former Member of Parliament, Shabana Azmi, went national (the company had tested the strategy in waterstarved Tamil Nadu last year with another actress-turned-social-activist Revathy Menon). Then, there is ITC’s Working for you, working for India campaign, one strand of which focuses on the company’s e-choupal initiative, an effort that seeks to enhance rural incomes, then, sell a variety of products and services to rural customers (apart from sourcing agricultural produce from them). The tagline itself smacks of old-style imageled CSR activity, but given what the e-choupal does, it is actually an attempt to build and position the company’s brand around the idea of doing something for the country. In some ways, ITC’s e-choupal is a far stronger example of a CSR-brand linkage than the Surf Excel campaign. It is a programme that is obviously advantageous to the company, yet it is accomplished by enough socially relevant goodies to make it look the way a government programme targeted at rural development ideally should. HLL, coincidentally, has an initiative that fits the bill, its Project Shakthi that uses Women’s self-help groups in rural areas to further its reach. “The problem with old-style CSR was that the benefactors were not in control of what they would get”, says Vivek Vaidya, a brand consultant. With brand or corporate strategy driven CSR, they are. Questions: Explain the success of Do bucket paani ab rozana hai bachnai (I will save two buckets of water a day) campaign for Surf Excel. What consumer behaviour insights can you draw from this case? Identify the personal and interpersonal factors that affect consumer behaviour for the product/service described in the case.