An Empirical Study On The Impact Of Corporate Social Responsibility On The Customer-Company Identification

With the remarkable development of China’s economy, market competitionbecomes more and more fierce, product homogeny propels companies to put the primetask trying to find the inspiring factor that provide persistent competitiveness.Meanwhile, costumers tend to focus on the social responsibility of the company whenfacing such high frequency of social corporate social problems. All these put companiesunder the pressure both from society and market competition, how would they find away out? How could the companies find an inspiring factor that provides developmentopportunities, innovation and competitive strength that best serves the society andprotect the benefit of the people?On the basis of stakeholder theory, this empirical research studied the impact ofcorporate social responsibility on the customer-company identification from theperspective of the customers, taking corporate reputation as an intervening variable andattempted to find a theoretical basis that effectively encourages the companies to fulfilland perform their social responsibility.This research started with the summary of the relating references such as corporatesocial responsibility and customer－company identification, then proposed the wholeframework and raised the hypotheses indicating the relationship between variables. Thisstudy enquired372PC users as the respondents and the main conclusions show asfollows:(1)Corporate responsibility for customers exerts a positive effect on thecorporate reputation;(2)Corporate reputation exerts a positive effect on thecustomer-company identification;(3)Corporate reputation could be divided intocognitive reputation and emotional reputation and the two parts have different level ofeffect on the customer-company identification: emotional reputation has a more criticaleffect on the customer-company identification. Meanwhile, cognitive reputation exerts apositive effect on the emotional reputation which means when customers evaluate acompany’s reputation, they start from cognition to emotion.The result of this research suggested reference for the companies on how toorganize their corporate social responsibility activities and thus promote theircustomer-company identification and customer loyalty.