The purpose of this study is to bring more clarity to the complex discussion of religiosity and its effects on consumer attitudes toward corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives and socially responsible shopping. Drawing on the Hunt-Vitell theory of marketing ethics, we investigate how intrinsic religiosity indirectly affects retail selection through the mediating variable of attitudes toward CSR. We also investigate whether a retailer's corporate social responsibility (CSR) and corporate social irresponsibility (CSI) moderate the relationship between consumer attitudes toward CSR and retail selection. We find that intrinsic religiosity indirectly affects where consumers shop for groceries, clothing, shoes, electronics, and home goods, and we find that only CSI impacts the retail selection decision. Implications for macromarketing theory, marketing strategy, and public policy are discussed.
Research on entrepreneurial marketing is now fairly common, and macromarketing is an established field. However, studies that incorporate variables of interest to both entrepreneurial marketing and macromarketing scholars are scarce. In the spirit of the special issue, this study crosses disciplinary boundaries in order to investigate how a macro-level policy variable (i.e., excise taxes) affects a key marketing variable (i.e., product quality) in a sample of small firms (i.e., microbreweries). The results of the study support Barzel’s “flight to quality” hypothesis. We conclude that high excise taxes invite quality-based competition. Furthermore, entrepreneurial microbreweries appear to recognize the flight to quality, and they capitalize on the opportunity to bring relatively high quality products to market. Implications for entrepreneurial marketing researchers, macromarketing researchers, and public policy are discussed.
Trust has long been recognized as an important component of marketing systems. However, while macromarketing researchers argue that a lack of trust in business can impact other components of marketing systems, very few empirical studies in marketing investigate the determinants or outcomes associated with this type of trust. Accordingly, we begin with the premise that trust in major corporations is a critical, micro-level attitude that affects the performance of a marketing system. Then, we investigate the factors that influence trust in major corporations by analyzing how perceptions of government involvement in business, political ideology, and other attitudinal and demographic variables affect trust. Using hierarchical linear modeling, we find that trust has a curvilinear relationship with perceptions of free-market competition, in which too much trust, or too little, leads to negative perceptions - trust plays a critical mediating role in constructing beliefs about free markets. Additionally, we show that macroeconomic variables influence the first stage of attitude formation toward major corporations, with gross domestic product (GDP) per capita and foreign direct investment (FDI) acting as moderators in our analysis. Overall, the multi-level moderated-mediation model used in this research embodies a true systems approach to the analysis of marketing systems by demonstrating how the economic outcomes of marketing systems (e.g., GDP and FDI) can also have feedback effects on participants within a marketing system.
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