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.
Highlights
No significant interaction effect was found between message content, message style and praise tactics on the three dependent variables
Hypothesis 1a (H1a) to Hypothesis 1c (H1c) was rejected, despite participants belonging to the sustainable resources group scoring slightly higher on trust, purchase intention and advocacy compared to their climate responsibility counterparts
This study examined to what extent message content, message style and praise tactics in 5
Summary
Climate change entails a direct or indirect human-induced change in climate that impacts the constellation of the global atmosphere [1]. Factors such as emissions of greenhouse gases and plastic pollution impact the climate to the extent that the system is in danger of becoming irreversibly out of balance, causing sea-level rises, increasing temperatures, ocean acidification, forest degradation, biodiversity loss and desertification [1]. How pressing the issue of climate change really is has emerged within global public consciousness over the last several years, with scientists directing attention to extreme weather events such as the annually increasing wildfires in California [2], or the global disappearing of glaciers [3]. A recent climate catastrophe, a massive outbreak of wildfires in Australia at the end of 2019, during which more than 4.9 hectares of forest were destroyed and 800 million animals were affected, traumatized the public further [4]
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