Today's consumers are increasingly concerned about corporate social responsibility (CSR). However, most consumers still know little about the real CSR performance of firms. If consumers are aware of the real CSR performance of firms, will they buy more from good firms and less from bad firms? This study aims to answer this question.
This study first used the focus group technique to find out what aspects of CSR consumers cared about. It then ran an experiment to explore how a firm's CSR performance might affect consumers' intent to buy its product. Forty university students joined 6 sections of focus group discussion, with 5 to 11 students in each section. A convenience sample of 200 university students took part in the experiment, and they were randomly divided into 4 groups with 50 students in each group. In the experiment, each participant read a description of a fictitious shoe manufacturer and its environmental and philanthropic performance. Both the environmental and philanthropic performance could be either good or bad, and the experiment was thus a 2 (environmental performance) by 2 (philanthropic performance) design. Results showed that when participants were made aware of the firm's environmental or philanthropic performance, they would be more intended to buy from the good firm than from the bad firm. However, participants' environmental and philanthropic concern was not related to such an effect of CSR performance. Implications of these findings for the government and businesses are discussed.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:NSYSU/oai:NSYSU:etd-0810111-215419 |
| Date | 10 August 2011 |
| Creators | Lin, Yi-hsuan |
| Contributors | Chia-De Wu, San-Pui Lam, Yu-Kang Lee |
| Publisher | NSYSU |
| Source Sets | NSYSU Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Archive |
| Language | Cholon |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.lib.nsysu.edu.tw/ETD-db/ETD-search/view_etd?URN=etd-0810111-215419 |
| Rights | user_define, Copyright information available at source archive |
Page generated in 0.002 seconds