The Research Of The Impact Of Consumers' Perceptions Of Corporate Social Responsibility On Purchase Intention

Corporate Social Responsibility as an important business growth and development issues are getting more and more attention by scholars in marketing, many of them had researched the response of corporate social responsibility from the consumer perspective. Study has confirmed that corporate social responsibility will have a direct or indirect effect on organizational identification, purchase intention, and consumer attitudes on consumer response to products (Sen & Bhattacharya, 2001; Berens et al., 2005). But Cone / Roper survey found that there is a gap between the company attitudes and consumers purchase intentions: Although many respondents expressed the attitude on social responsibility, but only 20% respondents in the previous year had purchased products from the company which active in social responsibility activities (Simon, 1995). Therefore, there must be some of the most important factors will play a role on the process of the perception of corporate social responsibility's impacting on the consumer purchase intention.Consumer attribution will be the antecedent variable of the corporate social responsibility perception and consumers purchase intention will be the outcome variables of the corporate social responsibility perception, and a deep research will be carried out which foucus on the role of consumer trust in the process of corporate social responsibility perceptions'impact on consumer purchase intention. How will the relations between the corporate social responsibility perception and purchase intention change with different service quality and different support level of corporate social responsibility.EllenWebb & Mohr (2006) summarizes the previous research and finds that the enterprise engaged in corporate social responsibility activities are divided into four categories of motivation, namely self-driven, strategy-driven, stakeholder-driven and value-driven. The value driven based on altruistic motives should have positive effects on the perception of corporate social responsibility, and egoistic driven based on the self-serving motives will have the reverse effect on the perception of corporate social responsibility. While strategic motives are a combination of two motives, but it will have a reverse effect on the perception of corporate social responsibility because of the prominent self-serving motives. Stakeholder-driven is a passive response for company's own interests because of the pressure from their stakeholders , it will have a reverse effect on the perception of corporate social responsibility.Corporate social responsibility have a positive effect on consumer purchase intentions (Mohr & Webb, 2005; Bhattacharya & Sen, 2004), but previous studies measure corporate social responsibility from a company perspectives, the bias is obvious. Actually, consumers usually make their purchase decisions based on their perception of corporate social responsibility but not the corporate propaganda reports. We measure consumer's perception of corporate social responsibility and its effect on consumer purchase intentions. In this process, impact, consumer's perception of corporate social responsibility will impct purchase intention through consumer trust indirectly.Corporate ability will moderate the relationship between corporate social responsibility and consumer purchase intention (Sen & Bhattacharya, 2001), service quality can best reflect corporate , and service quality will have a major impact for consumers (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry, 1988). In different service quality level, consumers'perceptions of corporate social responsibility will have different impct on comsumers purchase intention directly and indirectly. In addition, consumers supporting for corporate social responsibility will have same impact like service quality.In this paper, we collected 336 cases through survey, and then use SPSS and AMOS statistical software for analysis, and multiple regression, hierarchical multiple regression and other methods for hypothesis testing and analysis. Concluded as follows:(1) Consumers attribution will influence their perceptions of corporate social responsibility. value-driven motivation have positive effects on consumers'perceptions of corporate social responsibility, and egoistic driven, strategy-driven and stakeholder-driven have the reverse effect.(2) Consumers perceptions of corporate social responsibility have impact on consumer purchase intention through consumers'trust.(3) Comsuers perceptions of service quality moderate the relationship between conmsuers perceptions of corporate social responsibility and consmers trust.(4) Consumers supporting for corporate social responsibility have no effect on relationship between conmsuers perceptions of corporate social responsibility and consmers trustWe find that consumers attributions for corporate social responsibility activities mainly have negative impact on consumer trust and consumers purchasing intentions, which expand the Luo and Bhattacharya's (2006) work and suggest another path to assess corporate social responsibility through consumers trust. As a result, marketing managers can detect the level of consumer trsut to monitor the implementation of effective corporate social responsibility. For the companies providing different levels of service quality, Consumers perceptions of corporate social responsibility have different effects on purchase intentions. In particular, the provision of high levels of service quality can reduced the impact on consumers purchase intentons due to egoistic driven motivationFinally, we analyzes the limitatons for time and money constraint and some shortcomings in the research process, at the end of this paper, we suggest some issues should to do in the future research.