Corporate Innovation Strategies

6Analysis of Societal Strategies Based on Ethical Values and their Limitations with Respect to CSV

6.1. Issues concerning ethical values

Firstly, Decathlon has developed social practices drawing on the concept of ethical values and, therefore, corporate ethics. The formalization of values is at the heart of the company’s discourse. This formalization is a key vector of the company’s communication in responding to the pressures exerted by external regulations (Mercier 2000). These regulations come from the financial, product, resource and social markets, which exercise social control over what the company produces and how it does it (Brechet and Desreumaux 2001). For the company, communicating its values is part of a strategy to enhance its image, although this enhancement is difficult to quantify. The effect, in terms of the differentiation that this enhanced image can generate, is not intrinsic, as it assumes that customers are willing to adopt or appropriate these values in their practices and discourse by integrating them into their purchasing acts. This appropriation is not free of constraints. It is therefore useful to shed some theoretical and practical light on the factors involved in the difficulties of appropriating corporate values, which effectively limit their capacity to be a probable attribute of differentiation and create shared value (CSV). This research is structured in two parts. The first part is dedicated to theoretical developments with, respectively, ...