Abstract
Numerous studies argue that corporate social responsibility (CSR) helps companies build strong and positive relationships with consumers. However, it is not well understood why certain companies are more effective in their CSR activities than others. Some studies have attributed this difference to the country setting, but results are inconclusive. Building on signaling theory, this study explores corporate transparency as a boundary condition of the effects of CSR activities on the consumer–brand relationship. Three experiments and one large survey across three countries examine how a lack of corporate transparency undermines firms’ CSR efforts. Importantly, the authors theorize that country environments differ in terms of transparency, which is then reflected in different levels of corporate transparency. Different country levels of transparency help explain the discrepancies of CSR effectiveness for increasing brand attachment and building consumer behavior. Finally, the authors tie the diminishing effect of CSR in the case of low corporate transparency to an increase in consumer skepticism.
Highlights
Numerous studies argue that corporate social responsibility (CSR) helps companies build strong and positive relationships with consumers
When a signal is ambiguous, stakeholders start an “attribution process aimed at uncovering the underlying motive” (Ogunfowora, Stackhouse, and Oh 2018, p. 528). Drawing on this key idea, we argue that signal incoherence between CSR and corporate transparency stirs up feelings of ambiguity, triggering consumer skepticism regarding the motive of the signal, which in turn decreases CSR effectiveness
We hypothesized that skepticism mediates the effect of CSR on brand attachment and that transparency moderates the path between CSR and skepticism
Summary
Numerous studies argue that corporate social responsibility (CSR) helps companies build strong and positive relationships with consumers. It is not well understood why certain companies are more effective in their CSR activities than others. Different country levels of transparency help explain the discrepancies of CSR effectiveness for increasing brand attachment and building consumer behavior. The general influence of corporate transparency as a boundary condition of CSR effectiveness remains less understood It is unclear whether corporate transparency moderates the central link between CSR and the consumer–brand relationship (or brand attachment, our proxy for the latter variable; Kull and Heath 2016). While the marketing literature suggests that both company-specific factors (e.g., CSR issues, product quality) and individual-specific factors (e.g., consumers’ personal support for the CSR issues, their general beliefs about CSR) interplay with CSR effectiveness (Sen and Bhattacharya 2001), the variable of corporate transparency has not been identified as a moderator to CSR effectiveness
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