ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with professional life— uncovering the "business case" for investing in corporate responsibility and sustainability initiatives. "Leveraging Corporate Responsibility: The Stakeholder Route to Maximizing Business and Social Value," stakeholder reactions can be distilled into three main factors: Understanding, Usefulness, and Unity, which marketing manager also calls the 3 Us framework. Understanding constitutes the first step where stakeholders assess whether sustainability programs are in fact improving societal welfare and try to uncover what motivated the company to engage in sustainability in the first place. The second aspect of stakeholder interpretation of sustainability is Usefulness, or the degree to which the activities provide some form of functional or psychosocial benefit to the stakeholder. Finally, Unity is "identification" or the overall sense that the company's values match those of the stakeholder—the mediator that drives the value that companies seek from sustainability investments.
