IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/crepre/v19y2016i3d10.1057_s41299-016-0005-0.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

CSR as a Selling of Indulgences: An Experimental Investigation of Customers’ Perceptions of CSR Activities Depending on Corporate Reputation

Author

Listed:
  • Anne-Kathrin Ulke
  • Laura Marie Schons

Abstract

Companies are increasingly investing in CSR whereby companies with a bad reputation are no exception. The study at hand empirically examines customers’ evaluations of corporate credibility as a reaction to companies’ CSR engagement contingent on the firms’ corporate reputation. Drawing from psychological theories on contrast and recency effects, a conceptual framework is derived which proposes that firms with a bad reputation will benefit more from engaging in CSR compared to those with a favorable reputation. The framework is put to test using a large (N = 1,717), cross-industry sample (including evaluations of 71 independent firms from varying industries), and a between-subjects experimental design (CSR info is given versus no CSR info is given). Results confirm that, indeed, whereas companies with a bad reputation significantly benefit from CSR in terms of an increase in corporate credibility, there is no positive effect of CSR for companies with a good reputation.

Suggested Citation

  • Anne-Kathrin Ulke & Laura Marie Schons, 2016. "CSR as a Selling of Indulgences: An Experimental Investigation of Customers’ Perceptions of CSR Activities Depending on Corporate Reputation," Corporate Reputation Review, Palgrave Macmillan, vol. 19(3), pages 263-280, October.
    • Handle: RePEc:pal:crepre:v:19:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1057_s41299-016-0005-0
    DOI: 10.1057/s41299-016-0005-0
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://link.springer.com/10.1057/s41299-016-0005-0
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1057/s41299-016-0005-0?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Newell, Stephen J. & Goldsmith, Ronald E., 2001. "The development of a scale to measure perceived corporate credibility," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 52(3), pages 235-247, June.
    2. Won-Moo Hur & Hanna Kim & Jeong Woo, 2014. "How CSR Leads to Corporate Brand Equity: Mediating Mechanisms of Corporate Brand Credibility and Reputation," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 125(1), pages 75-86, November.
    3. Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, 2013. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Leonard C MacLean & William T Ziemba (ed.), HANDBOOK OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING Part I, chapter 6, pages 99-127, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    4. J.J. Graafland & H. Smid, 2004. "Reputation, Corporate Social Responsibility and Market Regulation," Review of Business and Economic Literature, KU Leuven, Faculty of Economics and Business (FEB), Review of Business and Economic Literature, vol. 0(2), pages 271-308.
    5. Carroll, Archie B., 1991. "The pyramid of corporate social responsibility: Toward the moral management of organizational stakeholders," Business Horizons, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 39-48.
    6. Skarmeas, Dionysis & Leonidou, Constantinos N., 2013. "When consumers doubt, Watch out! The role of CSR skepticism," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 66(10), pages 1831-1838.
    7. Yuan-Shuh Lii & Monle Lee, 2012. "Doing Right Leads to Doing Well: When the Type of CSR and Reputation Interact to Affect Consumer Evaluations of the Firm," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 105(1), pages 69-81, January.
    8. Deighton, John, 1984. "The Interaction of Advertising and Evidence," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 11(3), pages 763-770, December.
    9. Hong, Harrison & Kacperczyk, Marcin, 2009. "The price of sin: The effects of social norms on markets," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 93(1), pages 15-36, July.
    10. repec:ucp:bkecon:9780226316529 is not listed on IDEAS
    11. Ye Cai & Hoje Jo & Carrie Pan, 2012. "Doing Well While Doing Bad? CSR in Controversial Industry Sectors," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 108(4), pages 467-480, July.
    12. Lafferty, Barbara A. & Goldsmith, Ronald E., 1999. "Corporate Credibility's Role in Consumers' Attitudes and Purchase Intentions When a High versus a Low Credibility Endorser Is Used in the Ad," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 44(2), pages 109-116, February.
    13. Paul C. Godfrey & Craig B. Merrill & Jared M. Hansen, 2009. "The relationship between corporate social responsibility and shareholder value: an empirical test of the risk management hypothesis," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 30(4), pages 425-445, April.
    14. Becker-Olsen, Karen L. & Cudmore, B. Andrew & Hill, Ronald Paul, 2006. "The impact of perceived corporate social responsibility on consumer behavior," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 59(1), pages 46-53, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Kim, Yeonshin & Hur, Won-Moo & Lee, Luri, 2023. "Understanding customer participation in CSR activities: The impact of perceptions of CSR, affective commitment, brand equity, and corporate reputation," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 75(C).
    2. Georgios Chortareas & Fangyuan Kou & Alexia Ventouri, 2024. "Corporate pollution and reputational exposure," Financial Markets, Institutions & Instruments, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 33(2), pages 149-178, May.
    3. Kuldeep Singh & Madhvendra Misra & Jitendra Yadav, 2021. "Corporate social responsibility and financial inclusion: Evaluating the moderating effect of income," Managerial and Decision Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 42(5), pages 1263-1274, July.
    4. Small, Felicity & Mehmet, Michael & Miles, Morgan P., 2019. "Applying a causal ambush marketing framework to social media: The ‘Pleasure is Diverse’ campaign and the Australian marriage amendment," Australasian marketing journal, Elsevier, vol. 27(3), pages 149-157.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Chang-Dae Ham & Jeesun Kim, 2019. "The Role of CSR in Crises: Integration of Situational Crisis Communication Theory and the Persuasion Knowledge Model," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 158(2), pages 353-372, August.
    2. Arli, Denni & Grace, Anthony & Palmer, Janet & Pham, Cuong, 2017. "Investigating the direct and indirect effects of corporate hypocrisy and perceived corporate reputation on consumers’ attitudes toward the company," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 37(C), pages 139-145.
    3. Yoojung Kim & Sejung Marina Choi, 2022. "When Bad Becomes Good: The Role of Congruence and Product Type in the CSR Initiatives of Stigmatized Industries," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(13), pages 1-16, July.
    4. Santhiya Ramasamy & Karpal S. Dara Singh & Azlan Amran & Mehran Nejati, 2020. "Linking human values to consumer CSR perception: The moderating role of consumer skepticism," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 27(4), pages 1958-1971, July.
    5. Wójcik Piotr, 2018. "The business case for corporate social responsibility: A literature overview and integrative framework," Journal of Management and Business Administration. Central Europe, Sciendo, vol. 26(1), pages 121-148, March.
    6. Won‐Moo Hur & Tae‐Won Moon & Hanna Kim, 2020. "When and how does customer engagement in CSR initiatives lead to greater CSR participation? The role of CSR credibility and customer–company identification," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 27(4), pages 1878-1891, July.
    7. Yuhei Inoue & Aubrey Kent, 2014. "A Conceptual Framework for Understanding the Effects of Corporate Social Marketing on Consumer Behavior," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 121(4), pages 621-633, June.
    8. Giovanni Catello Landi & Francesca Iandolo & Antonio Renzi & Andrea Rey, 2022. "Embedding sustainability in risk management: The impact of environmental, social, and governance ratings on corporate financial risk," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 29(4), pages 1096-1107, July.
    9. Habitzreuter, Anna Mei & Koenigstorfer, Joerg, 2021. "The impact of environmental CSR-linked sport sponsorship on attitude toward the sponsor depending on regulatory fit," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 124(C), pages 720-730.
    10. Jochen Theis & Marvin Nipper & Marco Meier, 2024. "The influence of corporate philanthropic donations on private investors' valuation judgments: Experimental evidence," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 31(1), pages 540-554, January.
    11. Baobao Song & Jing (Taylor) Wen, 2020. "Online corporate social responsibility communication strategies and stakeholder engagements: A comparison of controversial versus noncontroversial industries," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 27(2), pages 881-896, March.
    12. Hua Jiang & Yang Cheng & Keonyoung Park & Wei Zhu, 2022. "Linking CSR Communication to Corporate Reputation: Understanding Hypocrisy, Employees’ Social Media Engagement and CSR-Related Work Engagement," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(4), pages 1-24, February.
    13. Jongmoo Jay Choi & Hoje Jo & Jimi Kim & Moo Sung Kim, 2018. "Business Groups and Corporate Social Responsibility," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 153(4), pages 931-954, December.
    14. Anat Toder‐Alon & Eyal Rosenstreich & Tali Te'eni Harari, 2019. "Give or take? Consumers' ambivalent perspectives on the relationship between a firm's corporate social responsibility engagement and its responsible tax payments," Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 26(4), pages 872-884, July.
    15. Anran Zhang & Alex Scodellaro & Bo Pang & Hui-Yi Lo & Zhengliang Xu, 2020. "Attribution and Effectiveness of Cause-Related Marketing: The Interplay between Cause–Brand Fit and Corporate Reputation," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 12(20), pages 1-17, October.
    16. Menno D. T. Jong & Mark Meer, 2017. "How Does It Fit? Exploring the Congruence Between Organizations and Their Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Activities," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 143(1), pages 71-83, June.
    17. Xie, Quan & Wang, Tianjiao (Grace), 2022. "Promoting corporate social responsibility message in COVID-19 advertising: How threat persuasion affects consumer responses to altruistic versus strategic CSR," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 148(C), pages 315-324.
    18. Madeeha Zafar & Imran Ali, 2016. "The Influence of Corporate Social Responsibility on Employee Commitment: The Mediating Role of Employee Company Identification," Asian Social Science, Canadian Center of Science and Education, vol. 12(12), pages 262-262, December.
    19. Chen, Chung-Jen & Guo, Ruey-Shan & Hsiao, Yung-Chang & Chen, Kuo-Liang, 2018. "How business strategy in non-financial firms moderates the curvilinear effects of corporate social responsibility and irresponsibility on corporate financial performance," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 154-167.
    20. Shuili Du & Edward Vieira, 2012. "Striving for Legitimacy Through Corporate Social Responsibility: Insights from Oil Companies," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 110(4), pages 413-427, November.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:crepre:v:19:y:2016:i:3:d:10.1057_s41299-016-0005-0. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.