How do virtual corporate social responsibility dialogs generate value? A case study of The Unilever Sustainable Living Lab

Today, companies have an increasing need to integrate stakeholders in CSR processes. The emergence of web 2.0 platforms and social media not only facilitates stakeholder interaction, but has also led to a new form of interaction opportunity called co-creation. We use a single case study of The Unilever Sustainable Living Lab to empirically test the virtual CSR dialogs framework, which is the main contribution of the paper. More specifically, we examine the extent to which CSR value can be generated by incorporating specific social media platforms that allow co-creation among users and companies. The findings indicate dialog characteristics were critical when designing co-creation dialogs on sustainability. Additionally, we confirmed the link between dialog characteristics and community identification and CSR expectations. However, the model failed to illustrate the difference between opportunities of co-creation, i.e., dialog characteristics, and actual co-creation experience.