Consumers’ Responses to Corporate Social Responsibility: The Mediating Role of CSR Authenticity

This study uses information processing and stakeholder theories as its conceptual foundation to explore the effect of authenticity on the relationship between corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and three key customer responses: corporate evaluation, product association, and purchase intention. We conducted a survey in South Korea to test the hypotheses. The results of the analysis of our sample consisting of 417 individuals showed that perceived CSR was positively associated with corporate evaluation, product association, and purchase intention. In addition, the mediating test results indicated that CSR authenticity mediated the relationship between perceived CSR and the three CSR customers’ responses to CSR. This study contributes to research on CSR authenticity and specifically adds to the conversation on the four CSR building blocks, namely, ethical codes, philanthropic contribution, organizational credibility, and resource accommodation in connection with CSR authenticity as a potentially valuable lens in the context of CSR. Managerial implications of these findings are also discussed.

PERSEPSI NATIONAL BRANDING SEBAGAI UPAYA MENINGKATKAN KINERJA EKSPOR KE JEPANG DAN AUSTRALIA

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mengetahui kaitan persepsi national branding dengan upaya meningkatkan kinerja ekspor yang diukur dari nilai-nilai budaya dan nilai ekonomis produk Indonesia. Penelitian ini dilakukan dengan pendekatan kuantitatif melalui survei kepada responden yang berdomisili di Tokyo dan Sydney dengan menggunakan teknik convenience sampling. Hasil penelitian memberikan gambaran persepsi masyarakat internasional, khususnya Jepang dan Australia, terkait nilai budaya yang menjadi cerminan bangsa Indonesia, serta sudut pandang nilai ekonomis berdasarkan brand equity dari produk ekspor yang didasarkan pada persepsi terhadap product country image, dan product association to the country of origin. This study aims to find relationship of the national branding perception and effort to enhance the export performance, from cultural and economic value perspective of Indonesian products. This study utilized a quantitative approach through survey for selected respondents in Tokyo and Sydney, using convenience-sampling technique. The research finding provides an overview of how the international community, especially those who lives in Japan and Australia, perceives the cultural and economic value of Indonesia based on brand equity, product-country image, and product association to the country of origin.

Predicting Consumer Choice Set Using Product Association Network and Data Analytics

Although discrete choice analysis has been shown to be useful for modeling consumer preferences and choice behaviors in the field of engineering design, information of choice set composition is often not available in majority of the collected consumer purchase data. When a large set of choice alternatives exist for a product, such as automotive vehicles, randomly choosing a small set of product alternatives to form a choice set for each individual consumer will result in misleading choice modeling results. In this work, we propose a data-analytics approach to mine existing data of choice sets and predict the choice set for each individual customer in a new choice modeling scenario where the choice set information is lacking. The proposed data-analytics approach integrates product association analysis, network analysis, consumer segmentation, and predictive analytics. Using the J.D. Power vehicle survey as the existing choice set data, we demonstrate that the association network approach is capable of recognizing and expressively summarizing meaningful product relations in choice sets. Our method accounts for consumer heterogeneity using the stochastic generation algorithm where the probability of selecting an alternative into a choice set integrates the information of customer profile clusters and products chosen frequencies. By comparing multiple multinomial logit models using different choice set compositions, we show that the choice model estimates are sensitive to the choice set compositions and our proposed method leads to improved modeling results. Our method also provides insights into market segmentation that can guide engineering design decisions.

Research on the Mechanism of Consumer Responses to Corporate Social Responsibility under Multi-Industry Context in China

This research examines the mechanism of consumer responses to CSR under multiindustry context in China. Data is collected by a three-industry comparative survey. The empirical results show that: 1) Two positive influences of consumers’ perceiving CSR performance on their corporate associations and product associations are respectively partially and fully mediated by consumers’ CSR trust; 2) Product category is a moderator of the relationship between consumers’ CSR trust and product association, and the positive path from product association to purchase intention. This study could help managers to understand how consumers think about CSR, and provides them strategic guidance to implement CSR programme in China.