Introduction to Marketing Strategy
Corporate Social Responsibility Book Analysis Guidelines
Overview and Objectives
Companies are becoming more concerned with the outcomes of their marketing decisions beyond just sales. Some

companies are embracing calls by consumers to be more socially responsible. But even if other companies think they

should have no goal besides shareholder value, the repercussions and consequences of business actions that are

perceived poorly by consumers can hurt a business over the long-term, sometimes fatally. Nearly every marketing

decision opens a door to questions that develop from conflicting interests between business managers and their

employees, shareholders, stakeholders, customers, communities, and society. Many companies are broadening what

stakeholders they include to encompass the triple bottom line of people, planet, and profits in order to proactively

address these interests.
To this end, the goal of this assignment is to help students a) critically analyze diverse corporate social

responsibility (CSR) issues in business practices, b) present and defend their own ideas, and discuss those of

others, and c) offer critical suggestions about future directions for various CSR issues in business.
CSR Book Analysis (25points) is due Sunday, June 1st at 11:59 PM via dropbox on ICON
Read “The Responsible Company” by Yvon Chouinard and Vincent Stanley. At the end of the book is a set of checklists

to help guide a company to be more responsible. Select one item from the “Customers” checklist and one item from the

“Community” checklist for your analysis.
Your analysis should be broken into four parts:
1) A summary of the checklist items you selected
2) Explain how the items are relevant to the topics discussed in class so far
3) Analyze the short-term and long-term implications and consequences of the items you selected based on how those

items were discussed in the book. Discuss negative as wells as positive implications.
4) Based on your short and long-term analysis, discuss how important it is for the viable future of a company to pay

attention to checklist items you selected