Corporate Social Irresponsibility and Purchase Intention

Abstract

An important objective of business research is to understand how organizational practices can influence consumer attitude and behaviors in order to help achieve organizational goals via consumer purchase intention. It was proposed and found in this study that consumers’ perceptions of certain Corporate Social Irresponsible (CSI) practices serves as antecedents of consumer purchase intention (PI) via corporate reputation (CR) and consumer attitude (CA). On the one hand, this finding may help understand the “black box” between CSI practices and PI. On the other hand, while CR refers to customers’ evaluations of the reputation of the organization and CSI represent a significant channel the organization uses to channel its irresponsible behavior to the community, CR and CA literatures have not comprehensively examined the effect of CSI practices on consumers CA and CR beliefs.  The findings in the hierarchical regression from a sample of 455 consumers of products in a large corporate organization in Kenya as a study documenting a negative association between CSI practices and CR and CA with PI suggests that consumers draw inferences from the CSI-related treatment they receive in assessing the supportiveness of the organization. By implementing CSI practices that demonstrate the organization does not care about the community and values their contribution, organizations are likely to be perceived as engaging in a high level of irresponsible behaviour. The results of this study add to our knowledge about the antecedents of CR and CA. Moreover, this study bridges the gap in the literature, by combining CSI, CR, CA and PI.