Effects of CSR initiatives on company perceptions among Millennial and Gen Z consumers

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine Millennial consumers’ responses to two corporate social initiative types – socially responsible business practices and corporate philanthropy – in combination with proactive and reactive CSR communication strategies. Design/methodology/approach A 2 (corporate philanthropy/socially responsible business practices) ×2 (proactive/reactive CSR communication) between-subjects experiment was conducted. Findings The socially responsible business practices were largely perceived more positively than the philanthropic initiatives. Likewise, greater public-serving motives were attributed to the socially responsible business practices compared to the philanthropy. While philanthropic initiatives were perceived more negatively when communicated reactively, there were no significant differences between proactive and reactive socially responsible business practices. Originality/value As an attempt to initiate the comparative examination of the effects of different corporate social initiative types, this study suggests outperformance of the socially responsible business practices type of corporate social initiatives over the resources-giving (i.e. philanthropy) type of initiatives even in the reactive communication setting where reputational threat resides.

When Bad Becomes Good: The Role of Congruence and Product Type in the CSR Initiatives of Stigmatized Industries

“…Scholars have identified diverse types of CSR initiatives and explored how such diversity influences consumer attributions and evaluations [18,39,[41][42][43]. Kotler and Lee [44] classified CSR initiatives into six activity types: corporate social marketing, cause promotion, cause-related marketing, corporate philanthropy, community volunteering, and socially responsible business practice [40].…”

“…Participants' ages ranged from 18 to 39 years, with an average age of 20 years. College students were chosen for this study as they represent an emerging consumer group with the highest level of social awareness and desire for companies to take a stand [3,43].…”

Corporate social responsibility motives of Indian firms

“…Businesses also compete to attract the best talent from the labour market, which has become critical to face the increasing competitive challenges because satisfied employees contribute significantly towards business success (McElhaney, 2009). This is true for younger generation people who make a significant portion of the labour market for the businesses today (Klimkiewicz and Oltra, 2017; Kim and Austin, 2019). Previous studies indicate a positive relationship between firm CSR and employee engagement (Caligiuri et al , 2013).…”

Within- and between-person(s) emotional reactions toward crisis communication

“…However, people might also perceive low CSR fit to be more value-driven when it comes to stigmatized industry because high CSR fit of a company in such industry could be seen as a proxy to serve a company's own benefits (Austin and Gaither, 2017). The contradicting results suggests that the key mechanism for CSR fit might be on “communicating sincerity” (Kim and Austin, 2019, p. 304) with consumers, such that high CSR fit can attenuate people's discomfort only when such CSR activities were perceived as being a company's sincere attempt to support its public and society.…”

“…Reducing negative affect associated with postcrisis CSR relies not only on whom the CSR initiative commits to but also on how honest the company is when communicating about their CSR efforts. Related to the “communicating sincerity” (Kim and Austin, 2019, p. 304) notion, stakeholders value transparency and accountability in a company's CSR engagement (Dare, 2016). Hence, including necessary information has been considered as an important step for executing CSR practices (Kim and Lee, 2018; Kim and Ferguson, 2018).…”