This research investigates the effects of brand perceived fit and consumer brand knowledge on CSR activities.
Past CSR research has primarily focused on the positive effects of CSR activities on consumers' corporate evaluations, purchase intention, a...
This research investigates the effects of brand perceived fit and consumer brand knowledge on CSR activities.
Past CSR research has primarily focused on the positive effects of CSR activities on consumers' corporate evaluations, purchase intention, and product quality evaluations. Drumwright(1994) suggested that when CSR activities are product-relevant, the CSR evaluations and the Corporate Abilities can be enhanced. Sen and Bhattacharya(2001) also revealed that company's CSR activities could influence purchase intension positively. However, it is not clear about the effects of the CSR activity which is consistent with brand-specific association.
This study reveals that two factors of CSR activity, product feature similarity and brand-concept consistency have a significant effect on evaluation of CSR and corporate evaluations. In addition, it proves the different effects that each the product-relevant CSR activities and brand-concept consistent CSR activities have in accordance with the consumers' different level of knowledge about the brand. It is expected that the conclusions drawn from this study will contribute to the effective planning of corporation's CSR marketing strategies.
In this study, I propose that CSR evaluations will be enhanced not only when CSR activity is product-relevant, but also when the brand and the CSR activity share the same brand association. I also propose that consumer's brand knowledge will play a role of moderator in evaluating CSR activities. In other words, brand-specific associations may determine the evaluations by experts, but product feature similarity may determine the CSR evaluations by brand novices.
Before starting the main research, in order to select brands and CSR activities more clearly, two preliminary researches were conducted. Through the first preliminary research, two brands belonging to the same product category but having different unique brand-concepts each were selected. Through the second research, based on the product feature similarity and brand-concept consistency, CSR activities of the brands, which were chosen from the first preliminary research are selected.
The overall design is a 2(brand-specific association: near vs. far) X2(product category: near vs. far) X2(consumer knowledge of the brands: high vs. low) between-subjects design +2 control group(Clinique vs. Bobbi Brown) and analysis of variance(ANOVA) was used to test the hypotheses.
Several results are drawn from this study as follow: First, product feature similarity of brands has a significant effect on CSR and corporate evaluations. In other words, when conducting a product-relevant CSR activity, more desirable results come out in evaluating corporation and CSR than when conducting a product-irrelevant one. Second, brand-concept consistency has a significant effect on CSR and corporate evaluations. In other words, when conducting a CSR activity that is consistent with the brand-concept, more favorable results come out in evaluating CSR and corporation than when conducting a CSR activity that is inconsistent with the brand-concept. Third, consumer's brand knowledge is proven to play a role of moderator in evaluating CSR activities. More specifically, the higher the level of consumer's brand knowledge, the greater the impact that brand-concept consistency has in evaluating CSR activities than product feature similarity does. On the other hand, when the level of consumer's brand knowledge is low, product feature similarity is a more dominating factor that affects the evaluation of CSR activities than brand-concept consistency.