The Acer Group is made up by three companies Acer, Gateway and Packard Bell. The group has a workforce of 7,400 people and tries to bring together multiple customer needs. The Taiwanese company Acer itself tries to bring Laptops to the end customer with an environmental friendly approach, Gateway is one of Americas best known PC brand and Packard Bell is known for its revolutions in radio, TV and PC (Acer 2017).
ACER
Corporate Social Responsibility (short CSR) becomes more and more important nowadays as the public is more aware of things such as sustaining the environment and using/buying products that support that.
Technology firms are aware of the situation and usually have a CSR strategy of their own. Acer has a separate website dedicated to their Corporate Social Responsibility. The word that immediately catches the eye of the viewer is ‘Sustainability’, which is written big and bold on Acer’s CSR website (Acer 2017).
When looking through the designated part on the website which is titled ‘Environment’, it shows that Acer is trying to create a 'green' supply chain, and are trying to make their production more environmental friendly (Acer 2017). This is the reason why Acer became a member of the Electronic Industry Citizenship Coalition (short EICC) in 2008 (Acer 2017).
The EICC is a non-profit coalition known for its support of the wellbeing and the rights of workers worldwide who are affected by the electronic industry (EICC 2017). The EICCs vision is for the world to have a global electronics industry that generates sustainable values not only for workers, but also for businesses and for the environment (EICC 2017). Members, suppliers and stakeholders are supposed to work together in order to improve environmental and working conditions through their practices (EICC 2017).
When you look at advertisements over the years it becomes apparent that Acer is very interested, and seemingly very engaged, in environmental work however they are not using it as a marketing strategy. The advertisements focus on the look of the laptops and computers, their weight, their graphic cards or their battery life. You never see anything about a CO2 reduction or something else in relation to their green supply chain. One could however argue that Acer is using symbolism in their advertisements to portray their involvement with the protection of our environment. For example, they usually use pictures of nature or people exercising in nature which can be interpreted as a symbol of their sustainable work. Furthermore, their logo is green, which is a colour often used for environmental friendly products (Empowered by Colour 2017).
Furthermore, Acers’ Instagram account shows their focus on selling their products to the end consumer. Therefore, it is not related to their CSR strategies. As can be seen in the picture on the right side, they make posts that will attract the typical Instagram user, with aesthetically pleasing pictures and quotes or text, that are popular to use on such a platform (Instagram 2017).
However, it is clear that Acer is using CSR more as a business strategy than a marketing strategy. Their CSR information and website can only be found if you look under ‘contact us’ and then go to ‘Corporate Social Responsibility’ and at the very end of the page you can find the link to Acer’s CSR website. On a closer look through Acer’s CSR website they state, they have a designated office
As the expectations of customers’ rise, it would be smart to have a CSR strategy in place which considers the interests of a wide community and those of the local environment (Creative Emporium 2015). According to Astara et al. (2015) it becomes clear that implementing Corporate Social Responsibility Strategies into the Marketing strategies of a company increases the efficiency of a business compared to those who do not do this. This would mean an increase in profits and direct positive attention to the business (Astara et al. 2015). When thinking about Corporate Social Responsibility it is important that it is consists of more than just one aspect (UKESSAYS 2015). Many companies such as Acer mainly focus on the environmental part in their CSR strategies and forget about the other aspects (UKESSAYS 2015). However, CSR is so much more than just that, it consists also of implications in the local communities, social and educational involvement as well as the external and internal business environment (UKESSAYS 2015). This means that if companies want to successfully implement their CSR strategies into their marketing strategy they must be aware of the important principles such as ethics and transparency, governance, human rights, etc (UKESSAYS 2015).
The fact that Acer already has a website for their CSR strategy shows that they really care about Corporate Social Responsibility, this is a good start. However, the website is very well hidden amongst their main website and many customers and possibly other stakeholders are unaware about their strategy because of that.When you search for Acers’ CSR strategy on Google, it basically only shows their
dedicated website (Google 2017). Only if you scroll through the search and click through more than one page, you can find some small articles which talk about what Acer is doing in regards to Corporate Social Responsibility (Google 2017). This underlines, that not many people are aware of this strategy, but as research has shown, more people are interested in the matter and only seeing Acers’ point of view, might turn them away, as the customer wants to see, that what they say is what they do according to Delbard (2010).
Unfortunately one is unable to see how many people have subscribed to Acers’ YouTube channel, but their videos are regularly watched by hundreds of thousands people (YouTube 2017) and therefore it would be a good start for them to come up with and create videos about their CSR strategy in order to promote their business further and generate higher profits.
to inform stakeholders about their strategy (Aver 2017). However, gathering from personal experience and after conducting research it becomes clear that, most people have no idea that that office or the website exists let alone what their strategy is about. This just makes it more obvious that Acer is not using their CSR strategies to promote their company to the end user, but possibly to business partners.