Consumer perceptions of corporate social responsibility and its impact on purchasing in economic crisis

Abstract

We intend to evaluate whether consumers are concerned about the social responsibility practices of companies in the economic crisis. For this, we analysed how consumers perceive corporate social responsibility (CSR) and then we identified which factors influence purchase in the economic crisis context. We used a survey to assess the consumers' behaviour and the questions were tested in two studies: the first, through confirmatory factor analysis and the second by logit estimation. For the first study, four main dimensions resulted of consumer perceptions of the corporate social responsibility in economic crisis: ecological reasons, no discrimination reasons, recycling reasons and communication reasons. The second study showed us that the main findings were that the purchase of socially responsible products is influenced by the knowledge on the part of the social responsibility practices consumer, the price of these products, the components perceived by consumers of social responsibility practices and by the economic recession.