Corporate social responsibility for sustainable corporate image,and competitive performance of manufacturing firms in Nigeria

Abstract

There is consistent growing competition in the business environment, and manufacturing firms in Nigeria have variously tried to distinguish their offers and brand image to achieve competitiveness, through various short-term conventional promotional tactics like advertisement. However, in most instances the returns from such cost-intensive sales and brand promotion initiatives are often non-commensurate to expenses,having short-lived effects, and lacking the embracive capacity to affect the perceptions of diverse stakeholdersof the organisations for positive image, reputation and overall competitive positioning. Consequently,the study examined the impact that social responsibility as an alternative means of shoring up corporate image before various stakeholders (customers, employees, regulators, host community, and government among others),can have on the image perceptions of manufacturing firms in Nigeria in their quest to evolve long-term winning strategies to appeal to diverse stakeholders like customers, employees, investors, regulatory agencies, among the rest. The study adopted survey research with 400 copies of questionnaire to respondents from seven consumer goods manufacturing firms based in South-west Nigeria. The hypothesis was tested with regression analysis and the result indicated that there was a positively significant relationship between social responsibility and corporate image enhancement of manufacturing firms in Nigeria. The study recommends that manufacturing practitioners in Nigeria should realign their business promotion communications by blending strategic management of their social responsibility initiatives into them, for better and longer lasting corporate image for due competitiveness. Also it is recommended that manufacturers should paypremium attention to philanthropic responsibility dimension, because the results showed that it has better influence on corporate image enhancement. In the main, the study findings re-affirmed that various stakeholders like customers, investors, regulators, host community, etc will have positive perceptions of corporate image of the firms, when the social responsibility is effectively managed, thereby leading to better business performance and competitiveness.