Willingness-to-punish the corporate brand for corporate social irresponsibility

Vernon H. Sweetin, Lynette L. Knowles, John H. Summey and Kand S. McQueen

Journal of Business Research, 2013, vol. 66, issue 10, 1822-1830

Abstract: This research addresses consumers' willingness-to-punish the corporate brand for corporate social irresponsibility (CSI). It is supported by the extant literature on consumer stakeholders, corporate brands, brand personality, regulatory fit, and psychological contract, as well as by punishment in psychology and philosophy, which are new to the marketing literature. Using an experimental design with a control group, this research examines consumers' willingness-to-reward and its converse willingness-to-punish a corporate brand under three treatment conditions of socially responsible, socially irresponsible, and environmentally friendly. Data were collected on four outcome variables of willingness-to-punish, willingness-to-reward, brand attitude, and purchase intention for each treatment group. MANOVA results indicated that there were systematic differences in the levels of outcomes among the four groups. Discriminant function analysis found the socially irresponsible group was statistically significantly different from the other three experimental groups for all four outcome variables. Consumers dealing with socially irresponsible corporate brands were more likely to punish and less likely to reward than consumers in the other three treatment conditions. This study illustrates the latent negative impact from CSI activities on four important dimensions of consumer response. The findings indicate there is a pragmatic need for corporate brand strategists to recognize consumers' willingness-to-punish the corporate brand and the subsequent necessity to avoid activities that consumers may perceive to be socially irresponsible.

Keywords: Consumer's willingness-to-punish; Brand personality dimension; Consumer's CSR association; Consumer stakeholder group; Corporate social responsibility; Corporate social irresponsibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (63)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296313000271
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:jbrese:v:66:y:2013:i:10:p:1822-1830

DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2013.02.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Business Research is currently edited by A. G. Woodside

More articles in Journal of Business Research from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().