Be good and look good: Communicating the triple bottom line through corporate websites

In recent years, communicating about sustainability based corporate identity - i.e., the values and ethos of an organization that reflect the sustainable foundations around which the corporate brand is built - has become a central element for building a positive organizational reputation. In the business sector, the triple bottom line (TBL) approach, or a balanced conception of sustainability around environmental, social, and economic per-formance, has been increasingly adopted over recent decades. This paper adopts a multiple case study approach to develop and illustrate a methodology for analysing sustainability based identity as communicated through corporate websites. A critical and comparative assessment was performed on the information conveyed by a sample of ten Ibero-American companies belonging to different countries and sectors, resulting in a number of specific improvement recommendations. As part of the methodology, a dictionary comprising 354 keywords and a total of 933 variants was built corresponding to the three TBL dimensions, which was then used to perform automated content analysis across the corporate websites in the sample. Overall, this study illustrates a powerful but simple way for companies to assess and improve their communicated sustainability based corporate identity.