Mattel Mattel Case Study

Introduction
While Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is vaguely explained by Caramela as, “business practices involving initiatives that benefit society.” (2016). The term is more precisely defined by Sarkar & Searcy (2016) as:
“CSR implies that firms must foremost assume their core economic responsibility and voluntarily go beyond legal minimums so that they are ethical in all of their activities and that they take into account the impact of their actions on stakeholders in society, while simultaneously contributing to global sustainability” (p 1433).
Just as numerous experts define CSR differently, businesses and their leadership differ on their statements, degree of participation, and level of follow through with their own CSR commitments.

When Mattel faced a PR nightmare in 1996, they felt they needed to make drastic sweeping changes to rebuild the customer’s trust and not lose their competitive edge (Sethi, 2011). Senior leadership mistakenly utilized a kind of ‘nuclear bomb’ response of promising too much too soon, when their unethical actions hit the media circuit. They found out the hard way that expansive degree of remediation was not warranted; nor was it practical or sustainable (Sethi, 2011), which lead to even more distrust from the consumers. It would have been more beneficial to focus attention on one or two areas of concern, remediate those, then move onto the next few. This staged approach would have allowed for a more viable impact. Mattel instead ultimately learned; if you don’t follow the rules, you can only expect to get away with your selfish deceptive actions for so long, before someone ultimately exposes

Unfortunately, there isn’t always a definitive path to prove that a lesson has been learned or the mistake won’t be repeated in the future (Hoover & Pepper, 2015). Mattel keeps telling the world they are dedicated to doing the right thing. It appears time and again they expect people will automatically believe them, eventually individuals will understand that actions speak louder than words. When a business has a fall from grace; it will take a lot of sustained hard work to regain the trust of the community, but a rebound is possible if it contains persistent ethical