Strategically manipulating social reputation by scheduling corporate social responsibility events

Abstract

This study intends to develop an effect assessment model to better understand how firms build social reputation by leveraging sequential corporate social responsibility (CSR) events. It incorporates the rehearsal, association, and recency effects to construct a model of social reputation that is derived from sequential CSR events with fixed and random corporate audiences. The results show that the evolution model of social reputation over time is a monotonically increasing function that has an upper limit. In the situation of fixed audiences, there is a definable CSR reputation saturation point. The values of social reputation increase sharply in the first stage of the profiles, which indicates that the CSR events significantly affect the social reputation in the short time subsequent to the first CSR event, and then the social reputation grows slowly. In the situation of random audiences, social reputation will only continue to increase when both the memorability rate and the association rate are much higher. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.