Luxury Brands and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): Combining the Conflicting Brand Concepts of Self-Enhancement and Self-Transcendence - Case Tiffany & Company

Abstract

Sustainability is arguably one of the major trends of the new millennium. For companies, this means increased demand for corporate social responsibility (CSR). Naturally, for some industries taking up CSR initiatives and even incorporating CSR as a core value is easier than for others. The luxury industry is one of the industries that struggle in convincing their consumers and the public of their sustainability concerns. One explanation for that is conflicting brand concepts. This phenomenon has been researched moderately during the past 10 years. Brand concepts can be divided, for example, into individualistic and collectivist brand concepts that can be compared to human values. Traditionally, CSR has been associated with a collectivist self-transcendent brand concept highlighting social and environmental concerns, while many luxury brands have been linked to an individualistic self-enhancement brand concept that emphasizes status and achievement. Some studies (Torelli, 2012) show that communicating about the self-transcendent values of CSR, and simultaneously, communicating about the self-enhancing luxury brand values, creates a motivational conflict in consumers’ minds’. This leads to a feeling of disfluency, and in many occasions, decreased brand evaluations. Since the importance of CSR is constantly increasing, also in the luxury industry, my research aims to find out if combining these two brand concepts is possible. I am also interested in finding factors that help self-enhancement luxury brands to engage in CSR in a credible way. I am examining this phenomenon with a case, a jewelry company Tiffany & Co. During the past 18 years, they have made significant CSR improvements, and aimed to lead the industry into a more sustainable future. In my research, I want to find out how this luxury brand endeavor to become a CSR brand is portrait in the media. I present 33 news articles on Tiffany’s CSR activities from the New York Times newspaper and from the Financial Times newspaper. The articles are since the year 1998, which was a significant year for the diamond industry, and the year when Tiffany started to focus on CSR