Social values and ethics for communicating the corporate identity

The ongoing changes – as both opportunities and threats – which are affecting the whole corporate system, push companies to look for competitive advantages and differentiation from competitors by making the best use of certain strategic levers; they are mainly represented by intangible resources (as harder to imitate) such as trade marks, brands, intellectual properties, ethics and social values (Colvin, 2007; Pellicelli, 2010). All these values become more relevant if taking into consideration the company no more as a “single entity” but as a set of “human beings” whose primary object is the production of products and services for a specific market. Consequently, as a set of human beings the company is more integrated with its reference society too and needs to communicate with both external and internal audience in a more effective and structured manner, covering different expectations, needs and cultures. On the other hand, the social communication regards tools of sustainable and social statements which aim at underlining the value creation for all the stakeholders inside and outside the organization, as well as the added social and economic sustainable values for the community in which the company operates. Accordingly, ethical principles and corporate social responsibility values are fundamental drivers for what is called integrated communication policies and are more and more reflected into the company’s mission. Moreover during the last years – when communicating corporate policies and values – companies have included also their current and potential ethics and social responsibility attitude, as distinguishing factors among competitors. The Ashridge model (Campbell, Yeung, 1991), confirms the statement: object, values, behaviours and strategies should be coherent and integrated so to give companies a clear orientation on their decisions, strategies and policies. According to this, the aim of the present paper is to analyze – on both a quality and empirical level – the effectiveness of ethics and corporate social responsibility values as drivers for integrated communication. A sample of Italian listed food and beverage companies will be considered so to establish if and how ethical principles and sharing corporate values have been built and implemented during the last years in a context which requires the spread of these values for increasing customers’ trust. The expected results are to demonstrate the link between literature and empirical evidence concerning effectiveness of integrated communication and its impact on company’s financial results and – in particular – on value creation for shareholders