A Bad Job of Doing Good: Does Corporate Transparency on a Country and Company Level Moderate Corporate Social Responsibility Effectiveness?

Abstract

Numerous studies argue that corporate social responsibility (CSR) helps companies build strong and positive relationships with consumers. However, it is not well understood why certain companies are more effective in their CSR activities than others. Some studies have attributed this difference to the country setting, but results are inconclusive. Building on signaling theory, this study explores corporate transparency as a boundary condition of the effects of CSR activities on the consumer–brand relationship. Three experiments and one large survey across three countries examine how a lack of corporate transparency undermines firms’ CSR efforts. Importantly, the authors theorize that the environment of countries differs in terms of transparency, which is then reflected in different levels of corporate transparency. Different country levels of transparency help explain the discrepancies of CSR effectiveness for increasing brand attachment and building consumer behavior. Finally, the authors tie the diminishing effect of CSR in the case of low corporate transparency to an increase in consumer skepticism.

Brand attachment: a review and future research

“…Built on relationship theories, numerous studies argued that if consumers are satisfied with a brand (Tsai 2011;Esch et al 2006;Kumar 2016), they will trust that brand more (Levy and Hino 2016;Ramadan et al 2021;Lam and Shankar 2014); in time, consumers will therefore develop brand attachment. Other studies have considered brand (Heinberg et al 2021;Hur et al 2020) as the antecedents of brand attachment.…”

“…Within corporate social responsibility and corporate transparency, Heinberg et al (2021) ascertained that consumer scepticism, as the mediator, diminishes brand attachment. Several studies have also examined the mediating role of brand attachment per se.…”

“…The impact of status consumption in the tourism industry (Hwang and Lee 2019a), types of stakeholders in sports marketing (Takamatsu 2021), perceived fit in brand extension (Pourazad et al 2019), perceived variation in service experience (Kumar et al 2019), types of visitors in hospitality services (Hemsley-Brown and Alnawas 2016), and perceived similarity in the brand community (Zhou et al 2012) have also been assessed as moderators. Within corporate social responsibility, corporate transparency (Heinberg et al 2021) and customer spirituality (Hur et al 2020) moderated the relationship between CSR perception and brand attachment. Consumers' psychological dispositions such as the need for belonging (Chen and Lin 2021), the need for uniqueness (Shimul et al 2021), as well as intrinsic and extrinsic motivations (Proksch et al 2015) also indirectly influenced brand attachment.…”

Antecedents and Outcomes of Social Capital: Evidence from a Professional Baseball Franchise

“…CSR refers to a series of activities adopted by an organization regarding its perceived societal obligations. 50 Additionally, CSR is associated with an organization’s ethical behavior and social obligations, which may be beyond the organization’s financial goals. 51 CSR activities have been increasingly implemented in sports organizations to support various demands including economic, social and environmental causes required by the community.…”

Well-Being in a Global World—The Role of International Marketing: An Editorial

“…Although we witnessed progress on the study of societal issues in a global context (e.g., special issues in the Journal of International Business Studies [Rodriguez et al 2006] and Journal of World Business [Shapiro, Hobdari, and Oh 2018]), international marketing is also starting to see its role more fully than before. In recent years, the Journal of International Marketing ( JIM ) has increasingly published articles addressing business and society (e.g., Heinberg et al 2021; Randrianasolo and Semenov 2022; Strizhakova, Coulter, and Price 2021), and the time is ripe for the premier international marketing outlet to demonstrate its commitment to addressing societal challenges. To this aim, JIM issued a call for a fairly broad special issue concerning a key concept for many stakeholders in the context of pressing societal issues and an important outcome: well-being.…”