Cecilia Casalegno

Innovation policy and environmental sustainability as strategic tools for reaching higher performances. A regional empirical analysis to find the best practice

Despite the sector or the company’s size, the choice of the strategies is worth; it is about a set of different aspects included by firms into their own strategic and operating procedures. The general aim of this study is to analyse how Italian Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are tackling the challenges by adopting more responsible and sustainable strategies and tools in order to create social and economic value and to compete successfully. Moreover, the paper is focused on setting up a rulebook for family business SMEs in which are specified suggestions about overcoming the crisis and achieving the success.

The Communication of Sustainability by Italian Fashion Luxury Brands: A Framework to Qualitatively Evaluate Innovation and Integration

Under the contemporary market conditions, Corporate Social Responsibility is required to turn into an integrated strategy for innovating and creating new business models. Luxury players are starting to embrace these strategies leveraging on many of their intrinsic characterizations that are, in fact, related to the concepts of sustainability and responsibility. Along with this tendency, also the communication of CSR is evolving in its contents and purposes and luxury brands are setting up strategies to engage stakeholders and customers on a plurality of communication means. Implementing an evolutionary approach of CSR requires greater changes inside the company and the communication of it needs to be homogeneous, transparent and, therefore, we argue, strategic. The power of luxury brands in the marketing expenditures favours their communication approach and impact, but what does it mean for a luxury player communicating about CSR and sustainability in a strategic way? Which are the boundaries between marketing and effective sustainable-driven strategy and communication? The chapter has twofold aims and uses a mixed methodological approach. Firstly, it aims at proposing a framework for qualitatively measuring the communication of CSR in an innovative strategic way. Secondly, it seeks to preliminarily investigate the extent of strategic CSR communication among a sample of 30 Italian fashion luxury players, through the content analysis of the CSR communications spread online, which is nowadays a trend that luxury market needs to constantly face. The research provides preliminary insights to the Italian fashion luxury brands about how to set up their strategic CSR communication and design a research model that can therefore be applied to a broader number of luxury brands.