The Research Of Consumers Responses To Corporate Social Responsibility

As a consequence of intensifying global competition, corporations are faced with adverse marketing environment characterized by overproduction, diminishing profit margins, and product homogenization. At the same time, besides concerning about needs fulfillment only at the product level, increasingly sophisticated consumers are beginning to consider more "pro-social" factors such as environmental protection, social welfare and business ethics in their decision making. Scholars and business managers are beginning to aware that corporate social responsibility (CSR) is much more than costs, constraints, or charitable deeds-it is also a source of opportunity, innovation, and competitive advantage. Though scholars advocate the positive effects of CSR on consumers'company evaluations and purchasing intentions, the reality is firms that are actively engaged in CSR activities can not get the full potential benefits of CSR. We argue there needs a shift of CSR studies from focusing on "Whether to do" issues toward "How to do" issues. To investigate the how-to-do issues, on the one hand researchers need to understand how consumers react to different CSR strategies, on the other hand researchers need to explore the psychological mechanisms through which consumers react to CSR initiatives. The prospective fruitful findings would have sound implications that can help companies engaging in CSR initiatives in the right way.Consistent with the above mentioned arguments, the current research was designed to investigate (1) Do consumers react to different CSR strategies differently? (2) If so, what are the causes of those differences; (3) Why the same CSR activity initialed by different firms lead to different and sometimes opposite consumer reactions; and (4) What are the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that driving consumers participating in corporate initialed CSR activities.First, based on stakeholder theory, attribution theory and Pirsch et al.'s (2007) research findings, we investigated the effects of different CSR strategy (Institutional versus Promotional), different CSR information sources (neutral source versus company source) and different level of information transparency (transparent versus translucent) on consumer corporate evaluations and product purchasing intentions by two separate scenario simulation experiments. The results show that Institutional CSR programs are superior to Promotional ones, the information from neutral source and are transparent are better than those from company source and are translucent. Further more, we found consumers' perceived corporate CSR motivations mediate the effect of CSR programs on consumer responses, which is consistent with predictions based on attribution theory.We noticed that attribution theory can not full explain why the same CSR activity initialed by different firms lead to different and sometimes opposite consumer reactions. Therefore, we introduced a new variable-consumer CSR expectation. Based on expectation-disconfirmation paradigm, we built an integrative structural model of the impacts of consumer CSR expectation and perceived CSR performance on consumer responses to CSR initiatives. Using sample survey, we got 738 consumers'responses to the well publicized Vanke donation scandal in the donation campaigns for Wenchuan earthquake rescue and reconstruction. The SEM results indicate consumer tends to integrate perceived CSR performance and CSR expectation in response to corporate CSR behavior. Perceived CSR performance has a positive effect on expectation congruency, whereas CSR expectation has a negative effect. The effects of CSR expectation and perceived CSR performance on consumer reactions are completely mediated by expectation congruency. Corporate ability positively influences CSR expectation and conusmers'responses to CSR initiatives.Finally, we also investigated the intrinsic and extrinsic motivations that driving consumers participating in corporate initialed CSR activities. Based on the theories of pro-social behavior studies, our empirical findings indicate perceived CSR, social norms, perceived self-efficacy and self-enhancement positively affect, but participation cost negatively affects consumer participation. An interesting finding is that participation itself has a positive effect on consumer brand attitude.The theoretical contributions of this study are as follows:(1) Based on the stakeholder theory and the attribution theory, the study investigated the effects of different CSR strategies on consumers'reactions and explains why. (2) Based on expectancy theory, the study empirically examined the impacts of CSR expectation on consumer responses, and found that consumers tend to integrate CSR expectation and perceived CSR performance in their reactions to CSR activities, which provides another reasonable explanation for consumers' responses to CSR. (3) We introduced another company-associations variable, i.e., corporate ability association, to explain why consumers have higher CSR requirements to companies with higher level of competence, and why consumers would depreciate or boycott these companies when their CSR initiatives do not meet with their ability. (4) We introduced Pro-social theory to identify consumers' motivations of participation in CSR initiatives, and empirically tested the influence of consumer participation on company brand attitude, by which laid the theoretical foundation for scholars to further study the socially responsible consumer behavior. At the same time, this study also has some practical implications. The findings of this study are not only beneficial for company to integrate CSR and marketing strategy to realize differentiated positioning, but also are valuable for companies to design and implement CSR initiatives.