118 Conclusions
It is derived from the analysis that Tetra Pak follows the general recommendation given by the theoretical framework used in this thesis, meaning that, from the scope of this study, the CSR report and the communicative strategies deployed by the company on its website and social platforms are found effective. This applies both to the aligning of the communication to the different needs of the primary stakeholders (being shareholders and investors, NGOs, CSR “experts” and employees), but also to how, more technically, the communication is framed.
As far as the company’s primary stakeholder needs are concerned, they seem to be fully met. Shareholder’s and investors’ demand for business performance data and the relevance of the CSR engagement to the organizational strategy and bottom line, in fact, is sufficiently responded to in the reports and on the website, where detailed information on the company’s economic benefit of its activities is given.
Similarly, NGOs and CSR experts, who usually look for facts and figures of the impact that companies’ maneuvers have on the environment, are faced with a huge amount of information relating to Tetra Pak’s active involvement in humanitarian projects and initiatives as well as on the company’s positive outcome of its daily operations.
Employees, on the other hand, who are classified as a highly influential stakeholder group, are provided with an extensive account on the progress that the company is making and all the different programs implemented to improve their health and working conditions.
Conversely, the analysis carried out through Du et al.‘s Framework for effective CSR communication (2010) has highlighted that Tetra Pak emphasizes the organization’s involvement in several CSR activities by laying considerable stress on the scope and consistency of its commitment to the causes and by placing emphasis on the motivation and CSR fit, which become known for readers more implicitly throughout the report. The apparently good reputation of
119 Tetra Pak, and the fact that the organization positions itself wholly in terms of CSR, is likely to increase the effectiveness of any of its CSR messages, and possibly reduce stakeholder skepticism. On the contrary, it is found that the communication on the corporate website may lack indications of self-beneficial motives for engaging in CSR, as even though the intentions of the company’s business operations may be purely philanthropic, Du et al. (2010) found that stakeholders will be skeptical to read about such a seemingly “picture perfect”
way of doing business. A slight misalignment in the selection of information, in fact, has been detected when scrutinizing the integrated Sustainability reports and the texts retrieved from the company’s corporate website. The former seem to give prominence to the company’s business activities, stressing Tetra Pak’s heart- felt engagement in CSR practices by resorting to well-structured sentences and visual aids such as graphs and tables. The latter, on the other hand, adopt a more persuasive stance as they pledge the company’s commitment to a sustainable business but, at the same time, serve the purpose of conveying the company’s high level of expertise by resorting to an advertising strategy that boasts the cutting-edge nature of the production processes that the company adopts.
Statistically speaking, these provisional conclusions have been confirmed by the extraction of wordlists, which have revealed a different semantic distribution of words across the three different corpora. While the web texts and the sustainability sub-corpora displayed a high preference for items associated to the company’s daily business activities and the company’s CSR values (business, products, performance, materials, operations among others, for the former; food, people, sustainable, environmental, development, protection, impact etc. for the latter), in the case of the Facebook and Unfold-blog texts sub-corpus, the items featured in the top positions were index of the company’s deep involvement in projects and programs targeting poverty, malnutrition and education as testified by the presence of words such as: school, milk, children, program, water and feeding.
120 A striking feature which predominantly emerged from the analysis of the most frequent words was the high incidence of the self-referential expressions: we and Tetra Pak. The inspection of the phraseology and the linguistic context in which they occur revealed that the first-person plural self-reference expression we was statistically incident in patterns relating to the semantic fields of ongoing actions (we work, we continue, we strive), financial results (we expect) and commitment (we are committed). Surprisingly enough, the third-person self- reference expression Tetra Pak, although statistically more relevant in the sustainability reports sub-corpus, was found to be the choice of preference in the Facebook and Unfold-blog sub-corpus, where, ranking 7th before the inclusive first-person plural pronoun we, it may have been used in an attempt to give authority and luster to an otherwise too dull company’s discourse on the social platform.
All in all the collected texts and reports turned out to be repositories of precise CSR values (i.e. food protection and availability, care for employees and the community, respect for the environment and renewable resources )which the company in turn conjugated to appeal to its stakeholders and win their trust regarding its responsible and sustainable conduct.
As far as the conclusions drawn in this dissertation are concerned, they should be seen as valid only within the scope of this study as the effectiveness of Tetra Pak’s CSR online communication is judged solely on the basis of the theories used in this thesis. In order for the effectiveness of the CSR report and online CSR communication in general to be analyzed more thoroughly, and in order to improve the validity of the results, further research is needed with a larger sample of data and over a longer period of time to shed more light on how the company’s CSR reporting may have diachronically evolved to keep up with the frantic pace at which stakeholders’ needs and expectations have changed.
Moreover, since this study has only concentrated on an international and global dimension of Tetra Pak’s communication, more variability in geographical terms could lead to interesting research on what culture-specific tactics are used
121 by the company on the single localized versions of its corporate website to unveil any possible peculiar device employed by the company to leave a positive impression on its stakeholders. Lastly, a broader study could also include a reception analysis measuring if Tetra Pak’s recipients of its online CSR communication find it to be effective.
