Consumer Responses to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Contribution Type

Diogo Hildebrand, Yoshiko Demotta, Sankar Sen and Ana Valenzuela
Additional contact information
Diogo Hildebrand: MKT - Marketing - EESC-GEM Grenoble Ecole de Management
Yoshiko Demotta: Fairleigh Dickinson University
Sankar Sen: Baruch College - CUNY - City University of New York [New York]
Ana Valenzuela: Baruch College - CUNY - City University of New York [New York]

Grenoble Ecole de Management (Post-Print) from HAL

Abstract: While companies contribute in different ways to the corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues they support, little is known about the effects of varying CSR contribution types on consumers' evaluations of the contributing company. This paper examines consumer reactions to two basic contribution types – money versus in-kind – in the CSR domain of disaster relief to demonstrate, through five studies, that while consumers evaluate a company more favorably when it makes in-kind rather than monetary contributions of equivalent value to CSR issues that are perceived to be less controllable, the pattern reverses when the company's contributions are made to CSR issues that are perceived to be more controllable. This interaction between contribution type and perceived issue controllability is more likely to manifest when controllability is accessible in the minds of consumers. The underlying process is driven by the extent to which the disparate emotionality of each contribution type matches the intensity of felt emotion evoked by CSR issues of varying perceived controllability, producing processing fluency.

Keywords: corporate social responsibility; contribution type; controllability; emotion; fluency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mkt
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: http://hal.grenoble-em.com/hal-01576949
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Published in Journal of Consumer Research, Oxford University Press (OUP), 2017, ⟨10.1093/jcr/ucx063⟩

Downloads: (external link)
http://hal.grenoble-em.com/hal-01576949/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:gemptp:hal-01576949

DOI: 10.1093/jcr/ucx063

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Grenoble Ecole de Management (Post-Print) from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().