India 12 October 2016: Consumer durables electronic company,LG, continues to strive to make life good for people with their upcoming CSR campaign, ‘Mute the growl’. This campaign aims at raising awareness on how food is disposed-off without a second thought, and how hunger is spreading throughout the nation.
CSR is an important activity for any corporate as it illustrates the effort that the company is ensuring that they give back to the community. CSR enables people to understand the company better, its values and its overall commitment to the community and people. While multinational companies like LG are scrutinized and often viewed with skepticism because they have to take from the environment for their commercial activities.
Through this new CSR campaign;LG wants to create awareness about the wastage of food, energy, water and other raw materials that go into the process of making food. It has also established certain statistics such as how one in seven people is malnourished. 50% of the food produced in the world is wasted. 40% of the food made in India is wasted. India is known as one of the hungriest most malnourished countries of the world. The level of malnourishment in India is horrific and leadsto diseases which are preventable in nature. However due to lack of access to medication in rural and remote parts of India these preventive diseases prove to be fatal in nature.
Even farmers today have smaller land holdings and heavy debt burden leaving them, and their families,impoverished and extremely hungry. The Public Distribution Systems that have been established in the different districts of the country are riddled with corruption;therefore suffer from problems that cannot be solved easily, but only through practical and implementable policy changes. This results in a majority of the citizens of India being deprived of their right to food.
In essence, being malnourished is a sign that people are being deprived of their right to life (article 21) which is a constitutional fundamental right. LG uses this program to bring such horrifyingtruths to the notice of the public. Using a video and a micro site LG is ensuring innovation in the way people see how much effort goes into the production of food which should ideally be enough for all. On the microsite,people pledge their support to end food wastage by eating smaller portions, not dispose food, make sure (that before it goes bad) in edible form, it can be used to feed animals. It also gives out the message that people should cook only the required amount of food.
Appreciation for food, empathy for those who do not have enough, are the essence of this campaign. Strategically using social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, this campaign will enable people to eat as much as they need to while ensuring that no wastage occurs. LG’s campaign imbibes and promotes Mahatma Gandhi’s idea of need versus greed, where “the world has enough for everyone’s need, not greed”. Through posters, blogs, pledges to make a difference this campaign ensures people engagement. This pan India campaign will also enable people to eat enough and help those who do not have enough to reach the position of enough.
Mute the growl is another inventive campaign of LG’s where it has taken an idea and made it into a campaign. It has given it a design that is implementable and simple for people to understand. It also enables the public to see the effort that is being put into practice because the output of the campaign is an obvious one. The biggest positive of this campaign is that it addresses one of the main issues that the country is facing, thus making its results a high priority for a large number of people. Ultimately it is an effective campaign that will create awareness, build authenticity and trust in the brand, and make people believe in LG’s highly transparent policies.