Becoming conscientious: how brands can shape a better world

Being, or becoming, a conscientious brand can be a valid answer to the challenges of the third millennium, which highlight a complex world that constantly changes (Bennet and Lemoine, 2014). More specifically, the driving forces behind the need for a brand to become more conscientious are the following: i) changes in consumer demand - consumers are rapidly becoming more conscious of the impact their consumption choices may have on society and the environment (Caruana et al., 2016), even if there still a gap between consumers’ intentions and their actual action (Ford and Stohl, 2024; White et al., 2019); ii) consumer activism - consumers are demanding and expecting brands to be authentic and to take a stance on socio-political issues (Kozinets and Handelman, 2004; Vredenburg et al., 2020); iii) employers acting as opinion leaders to legitimize the authenticity of brand socio-environmental statements and actions (Holt, 2004); iv) CEOs socio-political activism, which ensures the authenticity to prospective employees (Appels, 2023); v) presence of new competitors across business sectors that develop value propositions around sustainability and responsibility; vi) the growth of ESG investing acting as an intangible driver for value creation (Edmans, 2023), in line with new regulations, such as the European Union's Corporate Sustainability Directive (2023).

As corporate social responsibility gradually loses its capacity to legitimize and differentiate companies (Warren, 2022), brands are now moving to create and manage brands with a conscience (Iglesias and Ind, 2020; Abratt and Klein, 2023). The aim of such conscientious brands is to create a better world for all stakeholders and for society at large (Chandy et al., 2021). In the context of conscientious corporate brands, Iglesias et al. (2023) list four key traits. Accordingly, a conscientious corporate brand is driven by a transformative purpose, adopts a balanced stakeholder and temporal perspective, and enacts value co-creation processes over time and across multiple stakeholders, in order to develop the capabilities that will allow it to become more conscientious.

In this scenario, brands need to be aligned in two ways. The first is related to the strategic alignment between the brand moral values and promises and its delivery (Guzmán et al., 2024), which requires behavioural and communication consistency across all brand touchpoints (Iglesias and Bonet, 2012). Second, brand alignment can take a relational form and, thereby, can be driven by the overarching aim to ensure symbolic connections between internal and external stakeholders (Balmer, 2012; Hatch and Schultz, 2008). These aligned symbolic connections guarantee that the entire brand ecosystem is working together to achieve the same objective (Iglesias et al., 2023). By doing so, the brand becomes a strategic asset to boost employees’ performance (Carlini and Grace, 2021).

To summarize, conscientious corporate brands “do not only use their purpose as an internal driver, which influences their strategy and culture, but also as an external driver that shapes business relationships and strategically aligns business partners, encouraging them to co-create value and to adopt a balanced multi-stakeholder perspective and a balanced temporal perspective” (Iglesias et al., 2023, p.4). Conversely, misalignment undermines the authenticity of the brands trying to pursue a brand positioning based on sustainable and conscience-based principles (Ahmad et al., 2024; Vredenburg et al., 2020).