Conveying Trust in a Globalized Era

In present times much of a company’s success depends on the relevant stakeholders’ perception of their reputation and image. It is therefore particularly important for a company to disseminate suitable information about itself and use public-relations instruments as effectively as possible. More particularly, the belief that a company can “do well by doing good” has been gaining momentum recently, in response to rising public awareness of the social impact of a company’s performance. This has led an increasing number of enterprises to devote greater care and attention to the drafting of their Corporate Social Responsibility reports (CSR), which have thus become important communication instruments. However, the impact of globalization, which has brought along an increase in international business exchanges and the subsequent need to address a variety of audiences, has also given rise to important and controversial issues for what concerns corporate communication in general. On the one hand, companies are faced with the challenge to reach out to a multicultural audience, but on the other hand, in order to distinguish themselves from their competitors, they cannot but emphasize some traits of their national culture and identity, in an attempt to project a trustworthy and reliable image. This is in line with Hofstede’s principle: ‘Think locally, act globally’ (1998). In fact, several studies (Han and Terpstra, 1988; Ettenson, 1993; Jaffe and Nebenzahl, 2006) have demonstrated that stakeholders often refer to the ‘country-of-origin’ image as a tool to evaluate companies and their services/products. The present study focuses on the English version of the CSR reports published on the websites of two airlines with different cultural backgrounds: Delta and JAL. The analysis aims at finding out whether or not in our present globalized era the two selected airlines still refer to the typical values of their respective countries to create a positive halo (Tversky and Simonson, 1992) that may influence their stakeholders’ attitudes.