Abstract
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the moderating role of six personal traits in a causal model to study how customers’ perceptions of corporate social responsibility (CSR) influence their affective and behavioural responses to companies.Design/methodology/approachA structural equation model is tested in a sample of 1,124 banking service customers in Spain. Based on this model, a multisampling analysis is implemented to determine how gender, age, educational level, CSR support, collectivism and novelty seeking moderate customer responses to CSR perceptions.FindingsThe findings show that customer responses to CSR perceptions are consistently moderated by gender, age and CSR support. Men, people aged over 45 and highly supportive customers respond to CSR perceptions more positively than women, younger people and customers exhibiting a low level of CSR support. The findings concerning educational level and novelty seeking are less conclusive. Collectivism does not influence customer responses to CSR perceptions to any significant extent. Thus, the findings suggest that gender, age and CSR support are the most useful variables to segment the market to adapt CSR and communication strategies.Originality/valuePrevious literature has mostly focussed on identifying the personal traits that differentiate socially oriented customers from others. Thus, this paper contributes to previous literature by exploring the role customers’ personal traits play in the identification of differences in customers’ responses to their perceptions of the CSR implemented by companies that sell traditional services, such as banking services.
Highlights
The study of how customers relate to corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a relatively new line of research, and scholars consider that more information is still desirable (Pérez and Rodríguez del Bosque, 2013)
The exploration of customer personal traits has rarely been extended to the identification of differences in customers’ responses to their perceptions of the CSR implemented by companies that sell traditional products/services, it is well known that the market share of socially responsible products remains very small compared to these traditional products/services (Schollenberg, 2012)
The authors evaluated the reliability of the measurement scales by means of the Cronbach’s alpha (α), the composite reliability (CR) and the average variance extracted (AVE) index
Summary
The study of how customers relate to corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a relatively new line of research, and scholars consider that more information is still desirable (Pérez and Rodríguez del Bosque, 2013). The exploration of customer personal traits has rarely been extended to the identification of differences in customers’ responses to their perceptions of the CSR implemented by companies that sell traditional products/services (e.g., banking services), it is well known that the market share of socially responsible products remains very small compared to these traditional products/services (Schollenberg, 2012) It seems that providing useful clues for market segmentation in the context of these traditional products/services is necessary, as they still represent the largest share of commercial transactions in developed countries (Castaldo et al, 2009). On the contrary, ignoring customer heterogeneity can seriously bias the research findings and, thereby, yield inaccurate management conclusions (Sarstedt et al, 2011; Schloderer et al, 2014) Based on these ideas, in this paper, the authors examine the moderating role of several demographic and psychological traits in the conceptual model of customer responses to CSR perceptions previously proposed in Pérez and Rodríguez del Bosque (2015). The most relevant implications, limitations and future lines of research are provided
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