Assertiveness, Corporate Social Responsibility and Brand Association in Anti-globalization Era

This paper aims to look at the relationship among Assertiveness, a National value dimensions (NVD) component, CSR practices and brand association in Bangladesh. Perceptions of the managers from different organizations of Bangladesh, an emerging economy, has been determined and recorded using a 7 point Likert scale. Purposive sampling has been used to select 113 respondents representing banking, central bank, NGO, medical, academia, pharmaceutical, manufacturing and other service sectors. It is found that Bangladeshi managers are non-assertive implying the fact that the claim of Hofstede stating that Bangladesh is a masculine or, assertive society is invalid in this anti-globalization era (post 2008). The results of stepwise-regression prove that CSR to stakeholders, a dimension of overall CSR performance, is positively associated with brand association. Results also show that interaction between assertiveness and CSR to stakeholders have a negative and moderating effect on brand association in Bangladesh. If corporate CSR activities are taken in line with the findings of this article, the country will be able to build better resilience against natural and other disasters, a target under SDG 13. At the same time, it will help organizations to enhance their brand image; and more specifically, strengthen associations of consumers with the brand itself.

. However, none of these papers tried to individually test assertiveness of Bangladeshi society. Therefore, an investigation into this area is well warranted.
Moreover, CSR activities have been found to have links with purchase intention, evaluation of a brand by its customers (determined through the intention to pay a premium price) and product evaluation (Brown and Dacin, 1997;Nete-meyer et al., 2001;Ricks, 2005). However, the impact of CSR activities to Brand Association is under researched. Therefore, the authors became interested to test the interactional relationship between assertiveness and CSR practices of Bangladeshi firms and their impacts on Brand association. This paper does not only test the aforementioned relationships, rather establishes itself as a guide to understand the level of assertiveness, CSR practices and Brand Association as well.

Literature Review
Assertiveness -The definition of Assertiveness can be interpreted from the definition of Galassi and Galassi and presented in that behavior of a person which indicates the ability of that person to express his/her attitude, opinions and rights in a firm and honest manner while respecting the same of the other person during interpersonal interaction with the latter. Even though this is a psychological construct coming from counseling psychology, it may have interesting and meaningful application in marketing in dealing with consumer policy and consumer complaints. Interestingly assertiveness training can be offered to individuals and it has also been found that such training can improve self-esteem, positive reactions from others and decrease the level of anxiety related to different social situations for the trainee and can also be used in treating sexual, marital, anxiety of students and even chronic schizophrenics.

Assertiveness Research and Their implications in the field of Marketing -
The interaction of assertiveness behavior and marketing has been indirectly tested in different researches. For example, assertiveness training to an experimental group and tried to determine the efficacy of training by exposing the experimental group and a control group to high pressure sales techniques of a salesman who tried to persuade both groups to purchase magazines. The difference between the experimental and the control group was not found to be significant. However, there was a difference and the difference was in the expected direction. Manolică et al. (2019) published a thesis where the focus of the study was to highlight consumer behaviors of assertive and non-assertive consumers in terms of the differences in their responses to advertisement appeals, purchase intentions, information sources on which each of the aforementioned consumer groups rely the most while making purchase decisions of high and low-involvement products (Manolică et al., 2019). Their findings suggest that about 70% of their respondents were assertive consumers. They also found that level of education, family and friends, interests and hobbies of respondents had influences on determining if their behavior is going to be more or less assertive. Furthermore, they found that assertive consumers prefer the cognitive advertisement. One of the most interesting findings of their study is the fact that nonassertive consumers also prefer thinking processors. Hence, differences between assertiveness and non-assertiveness are really thin here. However, they have presented a tall list of the ways in which assertive and non-assertive behaviors of consumers have to be dealt with. As expected, there are lots of differences in the styles of dealing with these two different consumer groups. Therefore, assertiveness research had really opened new avenues for the marketers to effectively market their products and services based on behavioral aspects of consumers.
Assertiveness in certain situations is also required. It is found through prior studies that assertive and nonassertive consumers do not behave in some ways when they are frustrated with the products and or services of a company. Specifically hypothesized reactions of different categories of individuals; such as: assertive, non-assertive and aggressive, to frustration. They mentioned that non-assertive individuals are less likely to complain as a reaction to their frustration towards a company as opposed to their assertive counterparts. Once customer complaint is received, companies can take necessary action to correct it and make the customer satisfied (Jumaryadi, 2019). The action of managing complaints, or complain management, is also said to be an effective tool in deciding the right strategy to offer the best products or services to the customers (Filip, 2013). Therefore, it is understandable that if customers do not complaint but are frustrated with products of a producer and churn, companies will not have the opportunity to effectively re-design their products and services in order to retain dissatisfied consumers. Hence, assertiveness, in this case, can be a boon to the marketers, not a bane.
The above discussion suggests that consumers' assertiveness have decisional impact on managers of different firms. Managers as well as employees do interact with consumers on a daily basis. Therefore, managerial and/or, employee assertiveness also matters in the interpersonal context of the business interactions. Of course, managerial assertiveness may affect organizational decision making and the brand itself in different ways. However, this paper is only interested to find if managerial assertiveness affects organizational CSR practices and if such practices, in turn, can positively affect the brand as a whole.
Assertiveness as a dimension of managerial behavior and its impact on CSR activities -It has been found that geographic regions and national culture can explain differences in CSR performances of different corporations. For example, South East Asian companies lag behind in the dimension of CSR performances in comparison to the firms located in the South Asian and Asia Pacific regions (Thanetsunthorn, 2014). Thanetsunthorn (2014) stated that the differences are most likely to be caused by the national value differences, such as: the masculinity of the society (Thanetsunthorn, 2014; Wiley, 2009). Other researchers also found an empirically proven relationship between culture and CSR performances (Ho et al., 2012;Peng et al., 2012;Thanetsunthorn, 2014). There are also similar findings listed in different research articles; for instance: masculine countries do not sufficiently appreciate cooperative strategies, masculinity hinders helping behavior and masculinity culture possessing assertiveness and competitiveness negatively affect CSR practices (Kucharska and Kowalczyk, 2019;Steensma et al., 2000). Masculinity of a society has been well researched by Hofstede and many other researchers (as listed above). In fact, all of the cited researches of this paper related to masculinity borrowed the preliminary concept from Hofstede. Hofstede explained masculinity as the relative importance given by a society to issues such as income, recognition, advancement, which reflects assertiveness itself (Badawy et al., 2017;Hofstede, 1983). It is further explained as "The social implications of having been born as a boy" (Minkov and Hofstede, 2011).
The above discussions establish the fact that existing literature proves that the masculinity or, assertiveness of individuals in a society or, a country do affect CSR practices. The later section discusses CSR activities in more details and tries to identify how existing literature connects CSR activities or, practices with organization as a brand itself.

CSR practices and Brand
Association -CSR has many dimensions. One of which is Corporate Philanthropy. It has been defined as a voluntary charity or, charitable or, social work by an organization undertaken by the organization's slack resources (Sánchez, 2000). Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is also defined as a citizenship function of an organization which includes moral, ethical, and social obligations between the customers and the corporation itself (Wang, 2008 a. Receiving higher financial gains (Return on assets) b. Demand of the products produced, regardless of their nature, becomes comparatively more inelastic provided that the firm concerned is involved in ethical CSR practices c. Buyers buy more products of these firms and hold positive image regarding their (the firms') employment &investment practices d. If stakeholders and customers of these firms are satisfied, brand preferences of the firms improves e. Global brands, those are respectful to their social responsibilities towards local communities and magnify the positive impacts of their CSR activities to their stakeholders of which customers are a part, can enjoy increased brand equity f. CSR activities can positively influence corporate reputation provided that the customers are satisfied g. It has also been proven that brand identification mediates the relationships between CSR activities and service quality; which implies that if a brand is known to customers, CSR activities of that brand can enhance service quality.
However, there are evidences which suggest that corporate abilities are more influential than CSR associations on the perception and evaluation of the firm and its products (Brown and Dacin, 1997). Folkes and Kamins (1999) also fund that firms with inferior products are not evaluated as highly for their CSR activities as their superior counterparts (Folkes and Kamins, 1999;Tingchi Liu et al., 2014).
Brand Association -To understand Brand Association, at first, it is worthwhile to look at the definition of Brand. As mentioned in Kotler (2004), the American Marketing Association (AMA) has defined brand as "a name, term, sign, symbol, or design, or a combination of them, intended to identify the goods and services of one seller or a group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of competitors" (Kotler, 2000). Brand is similarly defined as the name and/or symbol that differentiates a product or service of one seller or, group from the other (Aaker, 1996 In a similar tone, Post (2005) defined brand as a bond of loyalty created through a psychic connection between the buyer and the firm and contains perceived value addition (Post, 2005). Brand has also been defined as a promise (Morel, 2003). A more detailed criteria has been developed by Nilson (1998). Nilson's criteria includes items such as: a clearly stated value, clearly identifiable differences with other brands, attractive, and a noticeable identity (Nilson, 1998). Wijaya's (2011) presented a definition, which can be considered as the culmination of above discussions. According to Wijaya (2011), brand is an impression that is left on the hearts and minds of consumers and produces a specific meaning and feeling (Wijaya, 2013). Wijaya's definition connects different concepts of brands presented earlier; such as: symbols, logos and/or, marks, which are imprinted in the hearts and minds of the consumers and which creates a feeling of trust and a promise of value.
The above discussions on brand give indication that brand imprint itself in the minds and hearts of the consumer. The image that is imprinted in the minds of the consumers comes from different product and nonproduct related attributes of the brands. For example: features which make a product work, physical attributes of the product itself, packaging, design, user information, a community of users and price information. These attributes produce Brand Image (Keller, 1993;Wijaya, 2013 In this article, the authors tried to identify the relationship among assertiveness of the managers of Bangladesh, CSR performances of different firms and their associations with Brand Association.

Hypotheses:
The hypotheses those are formed based on this objective and review of the aforementioned literature are as follows: H0 = There is no relationship present among assertiveness, CSR to society, CSR to Stakeholders and Brand Association. H1a = There is a significantly positive relationship present among assertiveness, CSR to society, CSR to Stakeholders and Brand Association H2a = Interaction among assertiveness and CSR to society and CSR to Stakeholders have significant negative influence on Brand association

METHODOLOGY:
Research Design -The research paradigm for this study is Positivism. Hence, the authors are only using quantitative techniques to find answers which will be true if tested anywhere in the country on any set of managers. Therefore, the findings will be law like generalization of facts (Saunders et al., 2009

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION:
Descriptive Statistics - Table 1 show descriptive statistics related to CSR to Society. The weighted score of this construct is 53.23 which indicate moderate CSR to society activities. As already described earlier, these activities include supporting local communities through fundraising, supporting rebuilding works of schools, buildings, sponsoring orphans following natural calamities, etc. Composite Score of this construct shows that Bangladeshi firms are moderately involved in these activities and there is room for more contributions.    Coefficients of the model show that CSR to stakeholder has the biggest positive impact on Brand Association. The interaction of CSR to stakeholder and assertiveness has a negative coefficient implying the fact that highly assertive societies have low CSR performances and these two phenomena collectively reduces the brand association. These findings, combined with the F-statistics mentioned earlier, ensures acceptance of both alternative hypotheses. It is also to be noted here that the interaction effect moderates the relationships among the other variables of this study and in line with the findings of Thanetsunthorn (2014). However, CSR to society and interaction variable between assertiveness and CSR to society have found to have no significant impact on Brand Association.

CONCLUSION:
Brand association, a dimension of Brand image, can be affected by many variables. This study only looked at the impact of degree of assertiveness and CSR performances of Bangladeshi firms on brand association. The result of the study shows that Bangladeshi managers are, in general, submissive (non-assertive). However, overall assertiveness level, a national value dimension, was found to be moderate. Similar to the findings of prior literature, this research also found that overall CSR practices of the firms are moderate. The results further show that CSR to society has significant positive influence on Brand association. Such results imply that strengthening the relationship with the firms' stakeholders through meaningful CSR activities aiming for maximizing stakeholder benefits, effective communication of such activities with the stakeholders, taking CSR actions leaving out current economic benefits and focusing on future ROA and profitability are more likely to associate the stakeholders, a fraction of whom are also the customers, with the brand itself. Moreover, the positive effect is likely to be maximized due to the interaction between high CSR activities and low assertiveness of Bangladeshi individuals. As far as national wellbeing is concerned, entering into meaningful CSR activities which builds a strong bridge between the stakeholders and the firms will also help the country to build resilience against natural and other disaster and improve the pace of recovery of the victims of natural and other disasters. It is also a goal under the current SDG targets, SDG 13.     Overall Comments: Highly Submissive       Sig. .000           Two items were reversed since they were originally reversed for analysis