In 2009, Michael Neuwirth, the senior director of public relations, questioned the impact of integrating Dannon’s deeply-ingrained and long-standing CSR, which was not a stand-alone focus area into the company’s overall mission of “bringing health through food to as many people as possible” (Marquis et al., 2011, p. 1). In other words, the CSR marketing strategy focused on leveraging the Danone brand’s halo effect among consumers. The product strategy focused on communicating Dannon’s proactive “Activia” brand as a nutrition-and health-focused yoghurt. Integrating CSR marketing and product-line strategies created significant internal and external challenges. The obvious issue in this case, as proposed by Michal Neuwirth was how the company’s long-standing, deeply ingrained CSR efforts, which focused on three areas of “People,” “Nature,” and Nutrition and Health,” helped in promoting revenue and sales growth and aligned with marketing strategies.
The case study shows that Dannon should not have prioritized advertising CSR activities, and efforts did not focus on marketing strategic plans and led to internal management and organizational culture clash. According to Marquis et al. (2011), Dannon’s CSR mission was highly internally focused, and few existing and potential customers knew about its efforts and activities of promoting health. Equally significant is that the CSR activities and efforts fell under the Regulatory and Corporate Affairs Department, which is not responsible for formulating, implementing, and communicating Dannon’s return on investment (ROI) for marketing strategies.
After much deliberations on the issue by senior managers and e-suite members, there was one agreement: the cons of prioritizing advertising CSR activities outweighed the pros of multichannel marketing approaches. Alessandro Arosio, the senior director of marketing, noted that focusing on CSR activities created significant tension between dedicating resources to advance the brand and to promote the social mission (Marquis et al., 2011). Dannon’s senior vice president of marketing, Marc Jove, supported Arosio’s claim by stating that CSR activities were only for publicity and failed to support targeted communication and messages to current and potential consumers.
“Why would someone buy a product because they like the company, even if the product is not relevant to them?” (Marquis et al., 2011, p. 10). This question posed by Jove signify how the CSR marketing and product strategy for both brands created external challenges. Jove questioned the concept of using CSR activities to promote and maintain the halo effect on consumers. The CSR marketing and product strategies failed to align with the emerging U.S. market (Marquis et al., 2011). For instance, the strategies, which did not focus on providing the rational benefits of yoghurt towards consumers’ health and overall well-being, slowed the prospects of achieving a higher market penetration rate and targeted advertising. Although Arosio agreed that CSR activities helped create the “halo effect,” which plays a critical role in enhancing market growth and consumption, the company would perform better by dedicating more communication resources to advertising the brand directly to targeted consumers. Thus, integrating Dannon’s numerous brand-level and corporate-level advertising campaigns would help the firm differentiate itself as the global leader that promotes consumers’ health via its product lines and product offerings.
In retrospect, Dannon’s CSR strategy failed to relate and fit with its management culture and attract minimal support from key stakeholders, especially for marketing managers and leaders. However, whether to communicate or not to communicate CSR activities depends on the demographics of targeted consumers and the market. Dannon took a holistic approach to CSR, as indicated by its mission statement. Besides, under CEO Antoine Ribound, the management deeply embedded the firm’s culture and business with social values, which led to the organization experiencing internal and external challenges of measuring economic performance and the impact of marketing changing consumer behavior encouraging consumption.