Organizational values expressed in the websites and its relation with corporate branding and social desirability

Master Thesis

European Master on Work, Organizational and Personnel Psychology (WOP-P)

(June, 2009)

STUDY OF HOTELS AND FOOD BUSINESS SECTORS

Abstract

During the last years companies are increasing the use of the corporate website on internet to show to the society information about themselves. About the corporate information they show, it"s usually described the values of their corporate culture. By this study is purposed to analyze the values that companies, operating in the Spanish market, publish in their websites. It"s done in two different sectors: hotels and food business. It"s questioned if the corporate values published are related to social desirability in an intention of the companies to align them with the social desired values, using their published corporate values as a marketing strategy related to build a positive corporate branding. It"s analyzed the website of thirty-one and thirty two companies in hotels and food business respectively to extract their published values. By other hand it"s analyzed the social desirability of the Spanish society about which values are considered desirable for the companies in any sector, in tourism and in mass consumption sector. It"s been found a match between the more desirable values in companies of the tourism sector with the values more frequently published in hotels. It hasn"t been found a statistical significant difference of values depending on the sector, but some possible reasons are described. This research has some important practical contributions and opens new lines to continue researching in this field.

Introduction

Internet is a global communication tool that allows companies to show to the society many aspects of themselves. During the last years it"s increasing the use of the website to inform the society about the corporate culture, and the values that it is composed. It could be supposed that the values declared in the corporate website is a truthful information that companies show to the society, but it"s needed to question if it"s really to inform the main objective, or it"s hidden other strategic intentions of marketing related to build a positive feeling to the consumer about its corporate branding. It"s possible that the strategy of the enterprises is to make consumers feel an alignment with the values desired by the society with the values published in their website, about their supposed corporate values of their culture.

That hypothesized desire of the alignment with the societal desired values could have the impact of devaluating or cancelling the significance of the effect pretended by the brand. Differentiation requires positioning, not products, but the whole corporation. Accordingly, the values and emotions symbolized by the organization become key elements of differentiation strategies (Hatch and Schultz, 2003). If all the companies declares the same values of their organizational culture, the strategies of marketing could make to the brand of the companies suffer the problem of don"t distinguish one company compared to the others. The consumer might don"t feel there is one brand that its values are more coincident with him than others. It can be related with the Gestalt theories that remark the importance of highlight the figure on the background.

Other problem that would suppose to base the corporate values only by social desirability, it would be a possible not alignment of the values desired by society (published as corporate values by the companies) and the individual values of the workers in the company.

The objective of this paper is to analyze the content of the website of companies operating in Spain and extract their espoused values from the corporate information, to see the differences and similarities between companies and sectors about their corporate culture published in internet. It"s going to be analyze in two different and concrete sectors to see if there is a different structure of corporate values published depending on the type of the product or service in which the companies have their business. By other hand is going to be studied the preference of the Spanish society, as consumers, about which corporate values are considered desirable in the corporate culture of any company, companies operating in the tourism sector and companies operating in the mass consumption sector. In this study, those values are going to be named with the label of "social desirability values".

It"s expected to find a match between the corporate values that companies publish and the social desirability values. It"s expected also, to find in hotels companies a different structure of corporate values than in food business companies.