Does Doing Good Always Lead to Doing Better? Consumer Reactions to Corporate Social Responsibility

2001/05/01 by Sankar Sen, C.B. Bhattacharya, CB Bhattacharya · 455 citations
Business, Management and Accounting · Decision Sciences · Psychology · #Business #Corporate Social Responsibility Reporting #Corporate social responsibility #Environmental Sustainability in Business #Ethics in Business and Education #Marketing #Perception #Political science #Psychology #Public relations #Quality (philosophy) #Social responsibility #Work (physics)

paper · open access · doi:10.1509/jmkr.38.2.225.18838

published in Journal of Marketing Research 38(2), 225-243 (SAGE Publishing)

openalex publication_date 2001/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/27

Abstract

In the face of marketplace polls that attest to the increasing influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on consumers' purchase behavior, this article examines when, how, and for whom specific CSR initiatives work. The findings implicate both company-specific factors, such as the CSR issues a company chooses to focus on and the quality of its products, and individual-specific factors, such as consumers' personal support for the CSR issues and their general beliefs about CSR, as key moderators of consumers' responses to CSR. The results also highlight the mediating role of consumers' perceptions of congruence between their own characters and that of the company in their reactions to its CSR initiatives. More specifically, the authors find that CSR initiatives can, under certain conditions, decrease consumers' intentions to buy a company's products.

Citations

• The pyramid of corporate social responsibility: Toward the moral management of organizational stakeholders
• PEOPLE AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE: A PROFILE COMPARISON APPROACH TO ASSESSING PERSON-ORGANIZATION FIT.
• The Company and the Product: Corporate Associations and Consumer Product Responses
• Dimensions of Brand Personality
• The moderator–mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: Conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations.

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Related

• Doing Well by Doing Good: The Benevolent Halo of Corporate Social Responsibility
• Can Consumers’ Altruistic Inferences Solve the CSR Initiative Puzzle? A Meta-analytic Investigation
• Corporate Social Responsibility, Customer Satisfaction, and Market Value
• Doing Good and Doing Better despite Negative Information?: The Role of Corporate Social Responsibility in Consumer Resistance to Negative Information
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