Social Values and Ethics for Communicating the Corporate Identity

The on-going changes—as both opportunities and threats—push companies to look for competitive advantages and differentiation from competitors by making the best use of certain strategic levers; they are mainly represented by intangible resources (as harder to imitate) such as trade marks, brands, intellectual properties, ethics, and social values. Values in particular become more relevant if taking into consideration the company as a set of “human beings”; companies must be more integrated with its reference society and need to communicate with both external and internal audience covering different expectations, needs and cultures. In this sense, the traditional communication may be now defined as “integrated communication”. Accordingly, ethical principles and corporate social responsibility values are fundamental drivers of this integrated communication policies and are more and more reflected into the company’s mission. The aim of the present paper is to analyze—at both a quality and an empirical level—the effectiveness of ethics and corporate social responsibility values as drivers for integrated communication. A sample of Italian listed food and beverage companies has been considered to establish if and how ethical principles and sharing corporate values have been built and implemented during the last years; the expected results are to demonstrate the link between literature and empirical evidence concerning effectiveness of integrated communication and its impact on company’s financial results and—in particular—on value creation for shareholders. Eventually, the study results show that there might be huge benefits in using an integrated communication; talking to people in a coherent way and sharing values constantly make firms achieve best results.