Warm Glow or Extra Charge? The Ambivalent Effect of Corporate Social Responsibility Activities on Customers' Perceived Price Fairness

Details

Serval ID
serval:BIB_6EF04F13E8E8
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Title
Warm Glow or Extra Charge? The Ambivalent Effect of Corporate Social Responsibility Activities on Customers' Perceived Price Fairness
Journal
Journal of Marketing
Author(s)
Habel  J., Schons  L., Alavi  S., Wieseke  J.
ISSN
0022-2429
Publication state
Published
Issued date
01/2016
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
80
Number
1
Pages
84-105
Language
english
Abstract
Prior research has firmly established that consumers draw benefits from a firm's engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR), especially the feeling of a "warm glow." These benefits positively affect several desirable outcomes, such as willingness to pay and customer loyalty. The authors propose that consumers do not blindly perceive benefits from a firm's CSR engagement but tend to suspect that a firm's prices include a markup to finance the CSR engagement. Taking customers' benefit perceptions and price markup inferences into account, the authors suggest that CSR engagement has mixed effects on consumers' evaluation of price fairness and, thus, on subsequent outcomes such as customer loyalty. The authors conduct one qualitative study and four quantitative studies leveraging longitudinal field and experimental data from more than 4,000 customers and show that customers indeed infer CSR price markups, entailing mixed effects of firms' CSR engagement on price fairness. The authors find that perception critically depends on customers' CSR attributions, and they explore the underlying psychological mechanisms. They propose communication strategies to optimize the effect of CSR engagement on perceived price fairness.
Keywords
Corporate social responsibility, price fairness, cost perceptions, behavioral pricing
Web of science
Create date
02/09/2016 15:08
Last modification date
20/08/2019 15:28
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