The Research On Strategy Of The Retailer’s CSR Creating Customer’s Shopping Value

At the background of increasing consumers’ socially responsible consumption and enterprises’ socially responsible competition, retailers’ CSR has strategic meaning for their competition. At the present, China’s retailing situation is in the transition between the times that marketing drives general consumption and the times buyers’ have absolute controlling power, customers shopping value has strategic meaning for retailers too. It is a valuable strategic issue for study how to integrate retailer’s CSR and its’ customer’s shopping value. This paper, at first, using constructivism as underlying methodology, puts forward the strategic thinking that retailer’s CSR creates customer’s shopping value to promote retailer’s CSR synergistically beneficial to its’ business competition. Then, this paper analyzes and points out that the above-mentioned issue is of complexity and in essence strategic synergy problem on the basis that retailer CSR’s essence and dimensions are analyzed and customer’s shopping value migration on the perspective of CSR is analyzed. Third, this paper introduces the theory and method of self-organizing strategic synergy, analyzes applicability of the theory and method to solve the above-mentioned strategic issue. At last, this paper constructs a conceptual model that retailer’s CSR creates customers’ shopping value, and verify the model by doing an experiment. This thesis comprises six parts, and main content of each part is as follows:The first chapter is introduction. The background, research significance,research content, research methodology, research features and innovation of the paper are systematically introduced.The second chapter is literature review. In this chapter, retailer’s CSR literature,customer’s shopping value literature and strategic synergy literature are reviewed systematically.The third chapter is extending research of related theory in order to lay a good foundation for the thesis. This chapter is carried out involving the followingthree aspects. At first, the essence, dimensions and value function of retailer’s CSR are analyzed. The study shows that the retailer’s CSR has three dimensions and one essence. The three dimensions are target stakeholder dimension, content substance dimension and pattern manifestation dimension. The one essence means the essence of retailer’s CSR is try to realize the balance among stakeholders by retailer’s self-interest and altruistic efforts. The retailer’s CSR has the function of value-creation, value-allocation and the function of satisfying customer’s holistic requirements. Then, the concept of customer’s shopping value migration is put forward through drawing ideas from customer’s value migration, the reasons and features of customer’s shopping value are analyzed. The study shows that the reasons of customer’s shopping value contain the following three aspects: the change of customer’s shopping task, the change of customer’ shopping thought, the induction of customer’s shopping atmosphere. As far as the features are concerned,customer’s shopping value migration is of necessary and occasional, stable and fluctuating, inducible, thus the weight of each component of customer’s shopping value is flexible and different. At last, the mechanism of the strategic synergy by self-organization is analyzed. The study shows that the strategic synergy by self-organization is the combination of self-organization theories and strategy management. Strategic synergy by self-organization contains the following main steps that are identification of synergetic opportunity, making choice of strategic order parameter, excluding the obstacles to achieve strategic synergy and making out the concrete measures to get strategic synergy. The application of strategic synergy by self-organization stresses the whole grasp of enterprise’s system, making use of the human-being’s self-organizing ability.The fourth chapter is the analysis and process of the issue that retailer’s CSR creates customers’ shopping value. This chapter holds that retailer’s CSR creates customers’ shopping value is a strategic proposition that retailer’s CSR should be synergistically beneficial to retailer’s traditional business activities. The strategic proposition requires that the retailer’s CSR is oriented to promote customer’s shopping value and can synergistically create customer’s shopping value. The issue of retailer’s CSR creating customer’s shopping value is a question of subjectivity,whole, synergy and complexity. How to cater to the customer’s subjectivity, grasp the whole and exalt synergy is the difficulty of the question; How to counteract complexity is the crux of the question. After a philosophical reflection on the question, we hold that the application of strategic synergy by self-organization in retailer’s CSR creating customer’s shopping value can counteract complexity, grasp the whole and exalt synergy. Therefore the theory of strategic synergy by self-organization has applicability to guide retailers performing CSR for more efficiently creating customer’s shopping value. The application of strategic synergy by self-organization in retailer’s CSR creating customer’s shopping value contains the following five steps:(1) to identify the synergetic opportunity through comparing synergetic cost and proceeds;(2) to decide on retailer being the strategic synergy system and the conception of “retailer’s CSR and retail business activities synergistically create customer’s shopping value” being strategic synergetic order parameter;(3) to analyze the process of the order parameter slaving the retailer’subsystems and the mechanism of retailer’s CSR creating customer’s shopping value;(4) to analyze the obstacle of the above-mentioned order parameter slaving the retailer system;(5) to find out and implement the concrete measures of exalting synergy.The fifth chapter is to construct a conceptual model named “applying strategic synergy by self-organization to promote that retailer’s CSR realizes three-level synergy”, and make an experiment is to verify the model. At last, the tactic suggestions on retailer’s CSR are put forward.In the sixth chapter, conclusions and summary of the paper are made.Shortcomings and further research outlook are pointed out.