From Strategy to Storefront: CSR and Brand Competitiveness in Franchise Networks

We investigate the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) and brand competitiveness in franchising. Our paper demonstrates the challenges of adopting CSR programs in franchise networks as franchisees are independent entrepreneurs whose activities are governed by franchise contracts. We measure CSR on two dimensions: proactive CSR-franchisor's strategy, and partner preference-selection of franchisees with proven CSR commitment. Grounded in the brand co-creation concept, we crowdsource the brand competitiveness data from an anonymous crowd of customers-active experiencers of the brand and use traditional survey methodology to collect brand data from the franchisors-original brand creators. The franchisor survey had 65 usable responses, with data collected from senior managers of franchise organizations in Austria. In the crowdsourced survey, each brand received a different number of assessments from min 87 to max 238, with an average of 142 assessments per brand. The results of cluster and regression analyses suggest that CSR positively influences franchise firms' brand competitiveness.Prior studies have examined the prevalence of CSR in franchising (Meiseberg and Ehrmann 2012), corporate social disclosure (Perrigot et al. 2015; Le Bot et al. 2022), the effectiveness of CSR communications (Oueslati et al. 2023), and the performance of CSR routines (Lawrence et al. 2024). However, the following three key gaps persist:1. CSR and Brand Competitiveness: No research investigates how CSR translates to brand competitivenessdefined as a brand's ability to outperform rivals through This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.