Do a company's CSR acivities affect consumers' purchasing decisions?

Abstract

Corporate social responsibility, CSR, is an important issue that companies today place a high focus on. It is a way for corporations to gain more value and enhance their image. The objective of the study was to find out whether a companies’ different kind of positive and negative CSR activities affect the consumers’ purchasing decisions. The study examined whether consumers place a higher focus on companies’ negative activities than positive ones. Additionally, the study aimed to find out if there are differences in the impacts of the positive and the negative CSR activities between the demographic groups based on the age, gender and income level. A quantitative approach was chosen, four hypotheses were formulated, and based on these, an online questionnaire was created. The questionnaire received 126 responses and the data was analyzed with Webropol and Microsoft Excel. The study found that the CSR activities that companies take part in, both positive and negative ones, do affect the consumers’ purchasing decisions. The data showed that when it came to the actual activity, negative activities had a higher impact on the consumers’ purchasing decisions than the positive ones. Differences in the impact between genders, age groups and income levels were not found. For the future, a longitudinal study that uses more data collection methods as well as analyzing tools, could be implemented. This way more consumers would be reached, and the data could be presented and analyzed more extensively and more precisely.