دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی مزایای مسئولیت اجتماعی شرکت ها - امرالد 2017

Benefits of Corporate Social Responsibility

Marketers have emphasized how their product benefits consumers beyond its functionality. One method of doing this is through corporate social responsibility (CSR), which is acts that benefit society beyond the legal requirement (McWilliams and Siegel, 2001). This strategy has led companies to fully integrate their positioning strategy around CSR, as evident in the claim by Blake Mycoskie of TOMS Shoes that he is not a CEO of a company but CEO of a movement to improve the lives of children (Mustafa, 2007). Marketing around a brand’s societal benefits has paid off, with 55% of consumers willing to pay more for products and services from socially responsible companies (Nielsen, 2014).

What consumers gain from their purchases has been examined in several contexts, such as pet ownership, online shopping, and catalogs (Mathwick et al., 2001, Holbrook and Woodside, 2008). However, it is unclear what consumers gain from CSR. There is strong conceptual and qualitative evidence, but no clear quantitative proof (Gallarza et al., 2011). CSR’s success depends strongly on its spiritual benefits, which are not apparent in other marketing contexts, such as pet ownership, online shopping, and catalogs (Gallarza et al., 2011). Thus, there is a clear need to examine the benefits derived from CSR and to understand how those benefits compare to spiritual benefits.

DISCUSSION

The examination of antecedents to spiritual benefit is rare in the literature (Peloza and Shang, 2011, Gallarza et al., 2011). By examining how spiritual benefits are affected by CSR, this study not only fills this gap but also demonstrates the importance of spiritual benefits in predicting consumer outcomes. Furthermore, it has been shown qualitatively and conceptually that CSR impacts benefits (Green and Peloza, 2011, Peloza and Shang, 2011); the findings of this research prove this relationship by demonstrating that CSR does have an effect on spiritual benefits and comparing that effect on spiritual benefits to other types of benefits.

This research adds to the literature by demonstrating that CSR influences spiritual, status, efficiency, and aesthetic benefits equally. These findings also help resolve some of the contradictions present in the literature. For example, Hartmann and Apaolaza-Ibáñez (2012) found that CSR does not provide self-expressive benefits, but Bennett and Chakravarti (2009) and Griskevicius et al. (2010) demonstrate that it does. This study resolves these conflicting findings by showing that CSR influences a self-expressive benefit of perceived status.