Corporate social responsibility: a consumer psychology perspective

This paper reviews the substantial body of work on corporate social responsibility (CSR), including the synonymous domains of cause-related marketing and ethical consumption, to synthesize the diverse findings on consumer responses to CSR. CSR is capable of engendering a range of company-favoring perceptions and behaviors, driven by both consumers' CSR-related motivations (e.g., consumer-company identification, affective motives) and their CSR-guided product perceptions. As well, the paper documents the plethora of CSR initiative-specific, company-specific, and consumer-specific factors that modulate consumers' reactions to CSR initiatives, and ends with a discussion of some key future research directions.