Can corporate social responsibility exist without brand image?

Photograph of consumers and familiar brands
Source: Own Personal Collection

The Question:
This post is more of a question rather than an answer, but I will give my own viewpoint. Although it may first appear that these two terms corporate social responsibility (CSR) and brand image are very similar, they do have different meanings. Corporate social responsibility, loosely, is where a firm or company does some social good that is not required by law. Brand image on the other hand is a way of marketing a good or service that is in line with their reputation or even 'personality' of a brand. So more clearly when I ask can we have corporate social responsibility without brand image is whether a firm will do some social good even if it is not (partly) in their own interests.
  

This question also raises the question of whether corporate social responsibility is intrinsically valuable or is instrumentally valuable. If it is intrinsically valuable then the social good that it creates is good in itself. If it is instrumentally valuable then the social good that it creates is only good if it serves another purpose such as having a positive effect on brand image (like a stepping stone.)So if its instrumentally valuable, then corporate social responsibility may only exist to serve the purpose of a brand image. Can we say that this is true, or does corporate social responsibility have a good in itself.
  

We commonly see CSR and this inevitably influences our decisions on what we buy, where we go and what services we choose. Some people choose to part with more of their money because they know that by buying that product they may be contributing to a 'social good.' This is inevitable. However, I ask, what if we do not know what good or bad firms do by making a product or offering a service, if we do not know whether product A or product B have done some social responsibility or not, would firms really invest into corporate responsibility.
  

If CSR is real then there must be a distinct and fundamental difference to brand image and marketing. That is to say if CSR was to exist, then firms and companies would still do some social good ( like sponsoring a charity or something along those lines.) They would simply do it because they want to give back to society, even if it does not change consumer decisions. If  not then it may be the case that CSR is a marketing tool that creates some social good as a result of trying to get customers to purchase their product or service.
  

The question, I think, remains open for discussion whether firms believe CSR is something worthwhile regardless of cost-benefit, whether CSR is just a way of building brand image or even something that is a combination of the two.

    

My answer:

I acknowledge that there are many different answers and counter arguments to what I say and I accept there will be, this is just what I think.
I believe that CSR cannot exist without brand image. I believe it is brand image that fuels many of the social goods that is generated. I do not regard this as a bad thing as, after all, we get the social good out of effective marketing management.
However, the reason why I do not believe that CSR would exist without brand image is that the firm would have to bear a lot of cost without getting any benefit. Though I believe that CSR cannot co-exist with there being no brand image, some social goods from firms would still arise though on a much smaller and infrequent periods ( to which I would rather describe them as 'donations.') I believe that the scale of CSR would not exist without brand image, even though firms may contribute from time to time.
 
An analogy I would like to make is to one of a volunteer. They volunteer X amount of hours a week, but if they volunteer an extra amount of Y hours then they will get an award and get recognised. Say this volunteer will do the extra hours to get this award, they may not have done those extra hours if their work had not been recognised. However, the volunteer still contributes X even without this recognition. In this sense the volunteer is the firm and the number of hours is the amount of social good they 'create.'
*(Counter point: Some may argue that the volunteer even will not work X amount of hours without recognition, because without recognition a person may not gain from volunteering.)
  

 Although, CSR may work on a smaller level if it was targeted by improving the skill assets of its staff and its potential applicants. Though it's fairly limited to the skill sets of its own employees as the firm may not benefit from the cost if it did not change employability preference as well as customer preference. For example, brand image as well also work for employment as if the potential applicant cannot differentiate between companies on their brand image, it does not make sense to maintain such a cost.

 

"The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits" - Milton Friedman, The New York Times Magazine (13 September 1970)

( I neither endorse nor refute the quote above but rather it is to serve relevance to the question.)

The Experience Machine

Original Image: http://consc.net/
papers/matrix.html

The Experience Machine ( as famously noted by Robert Nozick) is an argument that infers if given a choice between living a normal life with many faults and imperfections or being hooked up to a machine with tricks our brain that we are living in a perfect world. If given the choice Nozick argues that we much prefer real life because we know that the simulation is not real and we would much prefer real life as opposed to the perfect imaginary world. To use a comparison, in the film The Matrix, Neo has the choice between two pills with one placing him back into the state of imagination and the other allowing him to see the real world without computer simulation. It seems that we would always choose real life, wouldn't we?

Although, let's look from another perspective. What is appealing about such computer generated things such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and even computer games. This is certainly not real and no matter how much it reflects you, you're only really going to put the good parts on there aren't you. So in a way isn't every time you log in to these sites or play a game you are immersing yourself in something that is not really real for pleasure. I'm not saying it's wrong but it probably questions your opinion in the first paragraph. Every time someone updates their online dating profile to make them sound or look more appealing or taking a photograph that shows you doing something fun or interesting, it may all be something deeper, a plea to take control and perfect one's life via the virtual environment known as the internet.