The Influence of the Thematic Coherency of CSR Activities on Users’ Purchase Intention on E-Commerce Platforms

Abstract

Digital technology has reshaped the business landscape, E-Commerce platform enterprises are becoming a new organizational vehicle, and their social responsibility has attracted extensive discussions. However, most of the existing studies focused on the connotation, boundaries, lack of responsibility and alienation motives and management countermeasures of CSR in e-commerce platform enterprises, and little research has clearly pointed out whether e-commerce platform enterprises should choose to focus on a fixed theme to carry out high coherence CSR activities or invest in diversified themes to carry out low coherence CSR activities, and whether different coherence CSR activities will have different effects on users’ purchase intention. Drawing on the social identity theory and SOR theory, the present research develops the underlying mechanism through which thematic consistency of CSR activities influences the purchase intention by including consumer-company identification as a mediator. A theoretical model proposed to describe the hypothesized relationships was tested by the method of questionnaire survey and experiment. The results shown that consumer-company identification partially mediates the relationship between thematic coherency and users’ purchase intention and that the theme coherency of CSR activities of e-commerce platform firms has a favorable influence on users’ buy intention. The results point to the need for e-commerce platform companies to implement thematic coherence strategies in order to stimulate consumers’ more favorable purchasing intents and to achieve the best possible thematic coherence strategies for social responsibility initiatives.