CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND BRANDING STRATEGY. A COMPARATIVE STUDY OVER BANKING SECTOR IN ITALY AND THE UK

The research aims at investigating whether Banking Corporates use Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as driver to enhance their brand and pursue commercial value or to purely redefine their business priorities in accordance to the social shared value and consumers' behaviour evolution through a concrete strategy. It compares the situation in Italy and the UK. The analysis has been conducted on a sample of six Banking Corporates, three from the UK and three from Italy by adopting the comparative case studies methodology, to obtain common criteria of investigation. Many differences and some relevant similarities in the adoption of CSR as new strategic model and business function among countries and companies emerged, with UK banks showing a more formalized integration of CSR within their business strategy and serving as potential benchmarking for the Italian banks. The opportunity for the involved Banking Corporates is to share their emerged best practices over CSR to strive for a standardized model based on Corporate Shared Value as strategy for achieving commercial, financial, communication and social goals. The research is planned to be extended to the analysis of CSR from banking customers' perspective in the same countries at issue: Italy and the UK.