Does the perception of incongruence hurt more? Customers’ responses to CSR crises affecting the main reputation dimension of a company

ABSTRACT

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) generates benefits for companies and society. However, CSR exposes a company to potential damage when a critical event, such as a crisis, disconfirms the CSR of a corporate reputation. The present article introduces to the crisis management literature the notion of consumer-perceived incongruence (CPI) between corporate reputation and crises. Our first experimental study demonstrates that a high CPI – compared to a low CPI – worsens consumer responses in terms of attitude towards the corporation (ATC), word of mouth (WOM) and purchase intention (PI). The second study shows that these effects are mediated by the perception of a state of discomfort on the part of the consumer. The third study suggests that, in cases of high CPI, the corporate crisis response strategy of apology outperforms that of compensation in reducing the negative effects of discomfort on consumer responses. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• CSR
• corporate reputation
• crisis management
• incongruence
• apology
• compensation
• consumer behaviour

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See also Kang et al. (2016) about the effects of CSR on firms’ performances.

2. See Kantor and Streitfeld (2015) for details on the New York Times investigation of the working conditions at Amazon.

3. These variables have been extensively used in the literature on consumers’ reactions to crises (Coombs & Holladay, 2006; Grappi & Romani, 2015; Ham & Kim, 2017).

4. This article does not contain any studies with animals performed by any of the authors. All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

5. For further details about experimental manipulations, see appendix B.

6. We chose this country because in a separate pretest with 40 students from the same main study population (average age 22 years; 19 males, 21 females), the students answered Indonesia (45%), followed by China (40%) and others (15%), to the question ‘Which country is the largest smartphone manufacturer?’.

7. We gave participants a newspaper article on an unrelated topic (business innovation) to read as filler. The aim was to reduce demand bias by obscuring the connection between the experiment and the measurement (Khan, 2011).

8. For further details, see appendix A.

9. We manipulated only the dimension of the CSR crisis, while we kept constant the good corporate reputation scenario.

10. Importantly, we also demonstrated that the effect of CPI is independent from the CSR dimension of corporate reputation. That is, in cases of dimensional matches (i.e. high CPI), we found the same effects in terms of consumer reactions to the crisis, independent of the dimension of corporate reputation (‘green company’ or ‘best place to work’). The same outcome occurred in cases of low CPI. We thus concluded that the match versus mismatch rationale in differentiating consumer reactions was effective.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Giacomo Gistri

Giacomo Gistri, PhD, is Associate Professor of Marketing at the Department of Political Sciences, Communication and International Relations, University of Macerata (Italy). He obtained his PhD in Business Administration at the University of Parma (Italy). He has been a Visiting Research Scholar at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. His research interests include consumer behaviour and marketing communications. He has published in academic journals, including the International Journal of Advertising, Marketing Letters, Journal of Marketing Communication, Journal of Cleaner Production and Journal of Brand Management.

Matteo Corciolani

Matteo Corciolani, PhD, is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics and Management, University of Pisa (Italy). He has a PhD in Business Administration from the University of Pisa. He teaches Consumer Behaviour and Marketing Communications, and his research interests focus mainly on consumer behaviour. His projects include the consumption of authentic items, consumption communities, cause-related marketing and crisis management. He has published in the International Journal of Market Research, Management Decision, Journal of Cleaner Production and Marketing Theory.

Stefano Pace

Stefano Pace, PhD, is Associate Professor in Consumer Behaviour and Marketing at Kedge Business School (Marseille, France). He obtained his PhD in Business Administration & Management at Bocconi University (Milan, Italy), where he has been the Director of the Master in Marketing & Communication and currently teaches courses in consumer behaviour. He has been a visiting PhD student at the Wharton Business School (Philadelphia, PA) and visiting scholar at the University of Bath (School of Management) and the Karlstad University (CTF, Service Research Center; Sweden). His research interests mainly relate to consumer behaviour in the online and offline domains. His publications include articles in international peer-reviewed journals, such as Organization, Journal of Business Ethics, Marketing Theory, Marketing Letters, International Marketing Review, European Journal of Marketing, Journal of Cleaner Production and Group Decision and Negotiation.