Читать книгу Corporate Innovation Strategies - Nacer Gasmi - Страница 15

Societal attributes are based on the notion of trust (trust attributes), and the differentiation strategy that they can play raises questions about the asymmetry of information to which the customer may be exposed when making a purchase. Trust attributes have the peculiarity that they are practically never verified by the buyer before or after the purchase (Nelson 1970; Darby and Karni 1973). From this perspective, the social or environmental label, as a management tool linked to societal innovations, can reduce this asymmetry of information. A management tool corresponds to “any sign, technique or local and elementary know-how aimed at orienting or facilitating collective, individual and microsocial action” (de Vaujany 2006). A label, as a distinctive sign affixed to the product, makes it possible, in principle, to transform trust attributes into search attributes¹² and to solve the problem of information asymmetry between the seller and the consumer (Caswell 1998). The societal label then plays four major roles in optimizing the process of appropriating these societal attributes of product differentiation. First, it communicates to the customer a mass of information on the social and/or environmental practices developed by the company and the nature of the attributes (tangible and/or intangible) of differentiation that they can produce. Second, it provides a guarantee of trust as a credible societal attribute for the customer. This trust, which is a determining factor in the decision to purchase societal products, is the consequence of a belief created on the basis of information communicated by the company through its labels, and not of objective verification by the buyer (Gasmi and Grolleau 2002). Third, it can reinforce the competitive advantage that these attributes can generate (Quairel 2013). Fourth, the label also aims to push customers towards choosing products with societal attributes so that they can make inferences about CSR as a way of differentiating these products in their purchasing act. The concept of “appropriation” is defined as “the process by which the subject reconstructs for himself patterns of use of an artefact in the course of an activity that is meaningful to him” (Rabardel 1995). The label certainly plays a decisive role in the act of purchasing, but appropriation also depends on the attitudes that the customer may have towards CSR practices and the label as a management tool in general. In order to facilitate this appropriation, the company must place it in a psycho-cognitive appropriation perspective. This perspective, described as “pragmatic” and “semiotic” by Lorino (2002), fits into theoretical frameworks that are increasingly oriented towards a socio-cognitive prism, by adopting a structuration’s stance, in which the label is no longer considered as a lever for the rationality of the actors (clients) (de Vaujany 2006; Aggeri and Labatut 2010; Grimand 2012). The label then takes the form of an artifact for the action of a client in a situation, who will interpret it by giving it a meaning according to an individually and socially constructed pattern of use (Martineau 2012). The psycho-cognitive approach, which conceives appropriation as a process of acquiring new knowledge about management tools (labels), assumes that clients must develop a logic for optimizing the allocation of their attention (Kessous et al. 2010), with respect to these tools and the information they convey.