Consumer social responsibility: is it a new barrier for international marketers?

Jieqiong Ma, Jie Yang, Morris Kalliny and Douglas Roy

International Journal of Business Environment, 2015, vol. 7, issue 3, 242-261

Abstract: The importance of corporate social responsibility in the business world has gained interest among scholars within the last two decades. However, despite considerable work on corporates' social responsibility towards the community and environment, the social responsibility of consumers remains largely unexplored. As consumers become more aware of the social consequences of their purchases, is it possible that consumer social responsibility will become a new barrier for international marketers? The purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship between consumer social responsibility, consumer ethnocentrism, and consumer demographic variables that may influence this relationship. After sampling 206 US consumers, our results indicate that consumers with high social responsibility tend to have negative attitudes towards foreign products. In addition, we find that demographic segmentations such as age, gender, income, and ethnicity further alter such negative attitudes. In contrast, we find that consumers' education level has little impact on negative attitudes towards foreign products.

Keywords: consumer social responsibility; CSR; international marketing; consumer ethnocentrism; demographic segmentation; USA; United States; foreign products; age; gender; income; ethnicity; education level. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=71227 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:ids:ijbenv:v:7:y:2015:i:3:p:242-261

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Business Environment from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().