Study On The Relationship Between Consumer Perceived Social Initiativies And Purchase Intention

In recent years corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been discussed widely by academic researchers. Since 1990s, the focus of CSR research has been shifted from whether or not corporations should take social responsibility, which kind of responsibility they should it take to how to encourage corporations to fulfill their social responsibility, and what positive impacts it will have on corporate social performance (CSP) and corporate financial performance (CFP), etc.Consumers are considered as the most important stakeholders due to their capability to impact CFP through their purchase behaviors, so there are a lot of researches focused on the relationship between CSR and consumer's purchase intention (PI) in recent years. After literature review, two different research paths are found out, one is based on CSP's own features and the other is on consumer perceived CSP.We analyzed and combined the advantages of both paths, chose social initiatives, which belongs to philanthropy responsibility, the 4th layer of CSR, as the theme of this research, and then constructed the model of impact of corporate social initiatives on consumer's purchase intention, from consumer perceived perspective. We made two empirical studies on consumer perceived fit, motivation, and consistency of social initiatives. It is found that high fit and social motivated initiatives can raise consumer's PI, while low fit and profit motivated initiatives will have negative impacts on PI; compared to inconsistency, theme-consistent initiatives will raise consumer's PI, while inconsistency has no negative impacts on PI. Besides of PI, we also made some research on the impact of these three variables on corporate competency, credibility, and positioning evaluation. We found that fit and consistency have significant impact on some of above three aspects, while motivation has no impact on them.Besides of empirical study, we also utilized in-depth interview to find out what impacts corporate motivation will have on PI, under the typical event background. Through the interviews we found that consumers care about the events and initiatives'effects more than corporate motivation, and the PI change is reversible under this situation.