Visual CSR Messages and the Effects of Emotional Valence and Arousal on Perceived CSR Motives, Attitude, and Behavioral Intentions

Abstract

Companies have frequently used visuals (e.g., still images and videos) as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR) communication strategies, and those visuals often contain emotional content. As yet, however, scholars and practitioners have little understanding of how emotional design influences the effectiveness of CSR communication. This study examined how the emotional valence and arousal generated from contextual images in CSR messages affected the perceived CSR motives of companies, attitude toward the companies, purchase intention, and CSR participation intention. The results of a 2 (valence: positive vs. negative) × 2 (arousal: calm vs. arousing) experiment showed that arousing negative images elicited the highest level of attributing public-serving CSR motives to companies, the most favorable attitude toward the companies, and the strongest purchase intention, and CSR participation intention. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications.

Visualizing the triple bottom line: A large‐scale automated visual content analysis of European corporations' website and social media images

“…Past research has predominantly analyzed the textual contents of CSR websites (Tagesson et al, 2009;Tang et al, 2015;Vollero et al, 2019), which was often limited to specific industries (an exception is: Ott, Wang, & Bortree, 2016) or CSR-related topics on websites such as diversity (Pasztor, 2019), but has neither focused on websites' visual content nor taken into account the whole website. Visuals have played a role in CSR communication research so far mostly on the effects side (Chung & Lee, 2017), or in industry-specific analyses of CSR reports (Lock & Seele, 2015). However, analyses that stretch beyond single industries' or countries' samples are lacking (Tuan et al, 2019).…”

“…This lack is particularly striking as visuals foster re-tweeting behavior (Araujo, Neijens, & Vliegenthart, 2015) in different industries (Soboleva, Burton, Mallik, & Khan, 2017). Furthermore, as a relevant factor when engaging in a dialogue (Johansen & Ellerup Nielsen, 2011), images evoke emotions in audiences (Chung & Lee, 2017), which is particularly relevant for moralized communication as in the context of CSR (Glozer & Morsing, 2019).…”

“…their emotional effects (Chung & Lee, 2017). Furthermore, images work independent of language, which is important for multinationals operating in different language regions such as-condensed-in Europe and are an important information source on social media (Tuan et al, 2019).…”

The Impact of Perceived Corporate Social Responsibility on Frontline Employee’s Emotional Labor Strategies

“…Prior literature shows that primarily there are two types of perceived motives for the CSR of the companies, which are the public-serving and self-serving motives [15,[27][28][29]. For instance, Chung and Lee argued public-serving motives of CSR as efforts which are undertaken to benefit society or a cause that the company supports [28]. Whereas, self-serving motives of the CSR activities are those activities which are undertaken to benefit the company.…”

Request framing moderates the influence of affective images on charitable giving

“…Previous research has focused on the influence of discrete components of aid requests on giving, including affective images (Burt & Strongman, 2000;Chung & Lee, 2019;Fisher & Ma, 2014;Genevsky, Vastfjall, Slovic, & Knutson, 2013;Small & Verrochi, 2009) and message framing (Chang & Lee, 2009;Erlandsson, Västfjäll, Sundfelt, & Slovic, 2016;Fisher, Vandenbosch, & Antia, 2017). This body of findings has generated a number of compellingbut often competingpredictions (Erlandsson, Björklund, & Bäckström, 2015;Erlandsson, Nilsson, & Västfjäll, 2018).…”