The role of corporate social responsibility in enhancing corporate image

Abstract

This study was carried out to establish whether there IS a correlation between CSR activities and enhanced image of a company. Many Companies have come to embrace CSR as away of giving back to the communities in which they operate as one way of improving their livelihood through undertaking projects and monthly causes that directly or indirectly benefit society. All this in turn means that the corporation of any size, anywhere, is going to have to adjust so that it can market itself not only to one of its audience but to the entire spectrum of the community needs where it operates. The study was carried out in Magadi Soda Company. The Company was chosen for the study because it maintained its winning streak in the annual Company year Awards in Kenya when it retained the Corporate Citizenship Award, which it had won five times. Specifically, the study aimed at establishing what CSR activities Magadi Soda Company undertakes, what the Magadi stakeholders perceived of these CSR activities, and whether CSR activities enhance image of the organization. The study assumed that the corporation actions are indivisible and that everything within the corporation has an effect on everything else; that everyone has an effect on everyone else. The study also took the view that the corporation has closely integrated itself with society and that society is becoming increasingly judgmental about the behavior and actions of corporations. And that only those corporations making highly competitive products will survive. This means, in the long term, that products from the major competing companies around the world will become increasingly similar. Finally, the study has attempted to give recommendation that lays emphasis on community empowerment as a means of achieving greater degree of success to better the standards of living.