Research Home Depot, answer the following questions, and be sure to cite your sources:
1. Assess the company’s strategy and performance with environmental and employee stakeholders.
2. As a publicly traded corporation, how can Home Depot justify budgeting so much money for philanthropy? What areas other than the environment, disaster relief, and affordable housing might be appropriate for strategic philanthropy by Home Depot?
3. How does Home Depot’s desire to be passionate about customer service relate to their social responsibility?
Home Depot is the largest home improvement retailer in the United States. In 2021, the company had 490,600 employees and more than $151 billion in revenue. It is a company which is very much involved in the corporate social responsibility.Their founders are oriented with the fact that the environment and society should be protected and has launched certain campaigns. Strategy and performance are as follows: they encourages the employees to involve with the community through voluntary activities; they follows a recycling programmers wherever necessary and the company uses renewable energy such as solar energy; the employees feel themselves happy about the factor that they are working for a socially responsible organization; and they are giving equal opportunities to the employees without any gender discrimination. on the basis of caste, gender or age.
Obviously with design’s changing face and new brands and business taking over the lead, it is crucial to innovate and change on the strategy. Innovation goes hand with hand with the design strategy as well. In fact, as stated by Lockwood (2008), “innovation is dependent upon design”. It is simply invention plus design. Through years the designers gained the need to give the functioning invention an aesthetic look. Now days the design makes the product tangible and usable and gives it a bigger value. It is safe to say that sales, business growth, brands reputation do rely on the design directly. Through collected immense data from multiple researchers, the data tells us how impactful can a smart visual and strategical thinking be and what difference can these points make in the future. If you take all this points to consideration, it only tells how design is important. Stop and think about it. When we step into a bakery shop to buy something to eat and you have no idea how everything tastes, you decide on the looks. Or if you are buying a bicycle and you have two options with same price, without hesitation you pick the brand you like look wise more or is known to you already. It is simple as that. A good design matters.
Let’s be honest. All the great strategies or in our case designs start with a broad research. So many variables a designer needs to consider before coming up with ideas. Little details that non-designer wouldn’t have an idea about. It is the perception of the customer that we are adapting to. Earlier in the essay, I mentioned an advert from a technology company. So, I researched deeper. Huawei Technologies Co., is the world’s largest telecommunication maker. Recently beating another global company, Apple. As stated in article of Business Standard (Strumpf, 2018), after launching the new model of Huawei P20, “the company’s revenue increased by 30 percent”. After failing to succeed in previous years, the company just simply applied a new strategy. Engineers came up with triple lens cameras and designers applied a simply genius design to the smartphone and voila. Customers and audience are left impressed. On both design and user perspective. Invention plus design equals innovation. From once an ugly duckling, you have a beautiful swan, that has beaten a worldwide technological company Apple in less than a half year.