Presented every two years, the inter-university Philippe de Woot Award aims to promote corporate social responsibility (CSR) by recognising a master’s dissertation. Among the three dissertations short-listed for the 2018 award was that of Jeanne Cassiers and Audrey Herbeuval, of the Louvain School of Management (LSM), who asked an intriguing question: Why do consumers buy brands they find unethical?
Prof. Philippe de Woot de Trixhe, who passed away in September 2016, left his mark on generations UCL management students. Co-founder and dean of the former Institut d’Administration et de Gestion, which was subsequently renamed the Louvain School of Management (LSM), he was a CSR pioneer. During his 38-year teaching career, through his work and teaching talent, he enlightened thousands of students to the importance of humaneness and ethics in economics.
In order to carry on Philippe de Woot’s work, UCL created the Philippe de Woot Chair in Corporate Sustainable Management, whose mission includes the biennial presentation of the International Philippe de Woot Award, granted this year for the fifth time. While the award went to Copenhagen Business School graduates Kristina Feldt and Judith Klein for their work on the potential for improving working conditions in the Ethiopian textile industry, two young LSM graduates, Jeanne Cassiers and Audrey Herbeuval, were among the three finalists.1 Their work poses an interesting question: Why do consumers buy brands they find unethical?
Two companies perceived as irresponsible
Study supervisor Prof. Valérie Swaen (CSR) brought together the two students, who had come to her separately to propose topics addressing both marketing and entrepreneurial responsibility. The study thus took a rather innovative dimension, by considering the corporate responsibility (or irresponsibility) of companies and the ambivalence consumers eventually develop towards them. In order to quantify the feeling and its impact on purchasing behaviour, concrete cases were necessary. ‘So we started with a pre-study sample of 324 people who were fairly representative of the French-speaking Belgian population,’ Ms Cassiers explains, ‘and we asked them two questions: “If we mention irresponsibility, what companies whose brands are in supermarkets come to mind? Do you nevertheless still buy their products?”’
The most frequently mentioned companies whose products respondents still buy were Coca-Cola and Ferrero. The choice of the two companies covered by the study was therefore not subjective; the consumers themselves named them. Coca-Cola was deemed unethical owing to both a medical argument – excess sugar – and an environmental argument – depletion of water resources; Ferrero for its use of palm oil. However, societal irresponsibility was perceived differently among respondents: the young were more concerned about Ferrero’s irresponsibility, the older by Coca-Cola’s. .
No rejection
Ambivalence, however, is harder to pin down. For Ferrero, ambivalence increases with the perception of the company’s irresponsible side, which seems logical. But this isn’t the case for Coca-Cola: even if the perception of the company’s social irresponsibility is strong, ambivalence towards it doesn’t grow but rather diminishes. This is contradictory only at first sight. ‘Ferrero,’ Ms Herbeuval says, ‘is at a stage where people are beginning to be ambivalent. Coca-Cola is at the end of the curve: consumers have had a lot of negative information about the brand, so they’re no longer ambivalent at all and have clear, negative feelings.’
What about buying behaviour? Ambivalence doesn’t prevent product consumption. What comes into play is the sense of responsibility. If consumers continue to buy, it seems first of all because they feel helpless, i.e. ‘Anyway, my small purchase will have no impact on society.’ On the other hand, the more the consumer feels responsible and moves away from a ‘What’s the point?’ attitude, the more impact feeling responsible has on buying behaviour. ‘But this factor wasn’t present in our sample’, the authors conclude. ‘Consumers kind of copped out in order to allow themselves a short-term pleasure(2)
Henri Dupuis
(1) Out of 46 candidates, in addition to the respective works of the Danish and UCL students, a third dissertation was selected, that of Antony Simonfski of the University of Namur and KULeuven, on citizen participation in smart cities. (2) For the de Woot Award ceremony, the two UCL authors created a persuasive animated video about their work.
The authors Audrey Herbeuval et Jeanne Cassiers
