Journal of Human Resource and Sustainability Studies, 2022, 10, 98-110 https://www.scirp.org/journal/jhrss ISSN Online: 2328-4870 ISSN Print: 2328-4862 DOI: 10.4236/jhrss.2022.101007 Mar. 14, 2022 98 Journal of Human Resource and Sustainability Studies What Do Consumers Know about Corporate Responsible Management? A Case Study of Eight World-Leading Brands and Their Branding Strategy Mary B. Frambo, Hans Kok, Bruno Fon International Business School, The Hague, The Netherlands Abstract The background for the present investigation is testing the notion that the positive effect of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) on company perfor- mance can, at least partly, be explained by the reported synergy between CSR and branding. For CSR to have a positive effect on branding companies’ CSR efforts need to be efficiently communicated to potential customers and po- tential customers need to be aware of CSR activities of companies or associate specific brands with CSR. We investigated recent video advertisements of globally leading brands for mention of CSR-related themes. Secondly, in a survey, we investigated how far consumers are aware of differences in CSR efforts of these globally leading brands. Our results show that consumers have little idea of the CSR efforts of world-leading brands. Furthermore, the atten- tion to CSR-related themes in recent video advertisements is generally not high and very low for some of the companies. Keywords CSR, ESG, Branding, Marketing 1. Introduction Corporate social responsible management (CSR) is defined by the UN Global Compact as corporate measures that “align strategies and operations with uni- versal principles on human rights, labor, environment, and anti-corruption and take actions that advance societal goals” (United Nations, n.d.-a). These societal goals are summarized in the 17 UN Social Development Goals (SDGs), covering How to cite this paper: Frambo, M. B., Kok, H., & Fon, B. (2022). What Do Con- sumers Know about Corporate Responsi- ble Management? A Case Study of Eight World-Leading Brands and Their Branding Strategy. Journal of Human Resource and Sustainability Studies, 10, 98-110. https://doi.org/10.4236/jhrss.2022.101007 Received: January 29, 2022 Accepted: March 11, 2022 Published: March 14, 2022 Copyright © 2022 by author(s) and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY 4.0). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Open Access