Communicating Environmental CSR towards Consumers: The Impact of Message Content, Message Style and Praise Tactics

Abstract

While engaging in corporate social responsibility (CSR) has gradually become mainstream in the business context, the investigation of CSR communication and its effectiveness remains limited. This study examines how environmental CSR communication affects consumer perception and behavior through an experiment design. We distinguish three CSR communication factors—message content (climate responsibility vs. sustainable use of natural resources), message style (greenhushing vs. uniform vs. greenwashing) and praise tactics (consumer praise vs. company praise)—and assess their impacts on consumer trust, purchase intention and consumer advocacy, respectively. We also investigate the moderating role of attributed intrinsic and extrinsic corporate motives on engaging in environmental CSR. An online experiment (N = 304) revealed that a uniform message style outperforms the other two styles, whereas greenwashing is found to be least effective. In addition, attributed intrinsic corporate motives moderate the impacts of environmental CSR communication on consumer trust, purchase intention and consumer advocacy, respectively. No moderation effect was found for attributed extrinsic corporate motives. The findings provide important implications for effective environmental CSR communication with respect to specific message styles and attributed corporate motives.

Environmental corporate social responsibility initiatives and green purchase intention: an application of the extended theory of planned behavior

“…Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a crucial construct in marketing field and the topic involved in CSR has obtained wide exploration in the literature (Akbari et al , 2019; Han and Lee, 2021; Kim and Park, 2020; Igwe et al , 2018). Nonetheless, there is still a little investigation on the perspective of consumer social responsibility (Christis and Wang, 2021; Quazi et al , 2015), especially for emerging markets (Munerah et al , 2021), whereas consumer social responsibility can be nurtured by enterprises’ CSR activities and performances (Afiuc et al , 2021). Thus, environmental corporate social responsibility (ECSR) initiatives are included in the current study.…”

The impact of CSR on nonprofit outcomes: how the choice of corporate partner influences reputation and supportive intentions

“…This may be particularly true in the case of greenwashing, whereby corporations may exaggerate CSR practices to appear more environmentally conscious than they actually are (de Jong et al , 2020). As past work has shown, these exaggerations can have negative effects on corporate reputation (de Jong et al , 2020; Christis and Wang, 2021). However, finding a strong fit between the CSR initiative and the corporation's industry may attenuate stakeholder skepticism and improve reputation (Aqueveque et al , 2018).…”

Effects of climate CSA and CSR messaging: the moderating role of green consumer identity

“…Environmental CSR involves efforts that contribute to responsible stewardship of natural resources and overall environmental well-being (Han et al, 2020;Khojastehpour and Johns, 2014). Examples of environmental CSR activities include a company promoting or donating to a charitable environmental cause (Jeong et al, 2013), setting stewardship goals (Han et al, 2019), achieving third-party certification for products to verify responsible production (Christis and Wang, 2021), donating to environmental causes (Joireman et al, 2015), and using renewable energy (Babiak and Trendafilova, 2011).…”

“…, 2013), setting stewardship goals (Han et al. , 2019), achieving third-party certification for products to verify responsible production (Christis and Wang, 2021), donating to environmental causes (Joireman et al. , 2015), and using renewable energy (Babiak and Trendafilova, 2011).…”