A Study On How Cooperate Social Responsibility Affect The Brand Equity Of Retailer In The Circumstance Of Negative Word Of Mouth

As the link of consumer and manufacture, retailers have close attachment with consumers. They have great obligations in protecting consumers’security and interests. In recent years, cooperate social responsibility has attracted full attention. Almost90%cooperations of the Fortune Global500had implemented social responsibility in the proper moment, and published their activities in their own websites. Some large retailers are no exception, such as Wal-Mart and Suning, not only published their social responsibility activities on their websites, but also published its social responsibility reports to the public. Social responsibilities have been a part of their strategies. Social responsibility can help cooperate foster a good company image and enhance its brand awareness and brand reputation. Besides, social responsibility can give cooperate a special identity to attract consumers identify to cooperate, improve consumers’attitude, improve the willingness to buy and encourage consumers to do more that can benefit cooperate, such as resistance of negative information.However, social responsibility not always has positive influences on cooperate. Practices show that the perception of public to cooperates’social responsibility activities is unequal to the cost of them. After the earthquake of Wenchuan, Walmart and other companies were negatively influenced by the charity fraud. Researchers believe that consumers will search the motivation of cooperate social responsibility activities, and they will adjust their attitude according to their attribution of the motivation. When consumers attribute the motivation of cooperate social responsibility to improve its image and enhance its profit, consumers will response with negative attitude and actions. When consumers attribute the motivation of cooperate social responsibility to augment social welfare, they will response with positive attitude and actions. Sponsorship and cause-related marketing not only involved in social objective, but also related with the economic objective. And philanthropy only aim to enhance the social welfare. Thus, consumers tend to attribute philanthropy activities to altruism, and attribute sponsorship and cause-related marketing activities to egoism. When cooperate influenced by the negative word of mouth, the effects of CSR perception motivation become stronger.Under the negative circumstance, cooperate social responsibilities can establish moral equity and relieve the effects of negative information. Tha is because the goodwill of cooperate can makes consumers behaved in ways which are more beneficial to cooperate, and resist to negative information (Godfrey et al,2009). However, the discount principal believed when cooperate are facing the influence of negative word of mouth, consumers are more easily to attribute the motivations of social responsibility activities to self-regard. They rather to believe the activity is to be done to mitigate the negative influence, and it’s a short term act. Based on such attribution, consumers will response negatively.However, there is no research systematically study on the mechanism of how cooperate social responsibility influence retailer’s brand equity through consumers’ information processing. Besides, most of the researches were done under general circumstances, there is no research try to figure out if the cooperate social responsibility can relieve the negative influence of negative word of mouth. Thus, the paper, based on the SOR model, identity theory and the attribution theory, builds a research model to study the social responsibilities’influence mechanism to retailers’brand equity. And based on the attribution theory, the paper examined the reason why different activities can bring different results. At last, the paper put the research under the circumstance which is influenced by negative word of mouth to examine the adjustment function of two different kinds of word of mouth, product-related word of mouth and ethic-related word of mouth.Based on the literature review, the paper provides four main hypothesizes and designed two experiments to test the different responses of subjects. After the collection of data, the paper use SPSS19.0to test those hypothesizes. And the results show that:(1) different cooperate social activities have different influence on consumer-company identity. Philanthropy has greater positive influence on consumer-company identity than sponsorship and caused-related marketing does;(2) different cooperate social activities have different influence on CSR perception motivation. The level of egoism of cause-related marketing is significantly higher than sponsorship and philanthropy, and the level of altruism of philanthropy is significantly higher than cause-related marketing and sponsorship;(3) the egoism has negative influence on consumer-company identity, and the altruism has positive influence on consumer-company identity;(4) consumer-company identity has positive influence on the brand equity of retailers;(5) two different kinds of negative word of mouth have negative adjustment function on consumer-company identity and brand equity of retailers. The result confirmed the four main hypothesizes.At the end of the paper, some advices have been provided to retailers to help them choose the right social responsibility activities and utilize cooperate social responsibility to enhance the brand equity of retailers. At last, the paper points out the limitation and put forward the direction of further research.