This section provides a theoretical background to the research by reviewing the key literature on CSR and studies on consumer knowledge within the area of CSR. The hypotheses are also included in the sub-sections below.
2.1. CSR Overview
In essence, CSR is concerned with ethical and humane practices [
20], whereby corporations take responsibility beyond profit and, thus, encompasses fields such as the environment, labor and human rights, philanthropy, corporate governance, corruption, and product features [
2]. The potential scope of CSR is reflected in diverse definitions [
21]; for example, Joyner and Payne focus on values and business ethics [
22], but Sebastian argues that “corporate social responsibility is a generalized concept of what constitutes ‘good‘ or ‘desirable‘ business behavior” [
23] (p. 110).
The most influential framework for CSR is Carroll’s pyramid of responsibilities, with the pyramid structure implying hierarchical prioritization (e.g., philanthropy at the top) [
24], which is still used in the field of CSR and consumer responses [
25]. However, in later work and reflecting changes in the literature, Schwarz and Carroll proposed a three-domain model that included economic, ethical, and legal areas of responsibility depicted in a Venn diagram, thus equalizing the status of the domains [
26]. Later accounts reflected this more holistic approach, for example, incorporating economics, politics, social integration, and ethics [
27], or encompassing philosophical, psychological, and managerial perspectives [
28]. The more holistic approach has not necessarily been reflected in literature and research; for example, some authors argue that there is a too strong focus on environmental factors in CSR literature [
5,
18,
19], with very few studies in the business research arena looking at a wider breadth of CSR domains (e.g., two CSR domains of environment and employees, or seven CSR domains [
29,
30]). Even less emphasis has been put on trying to understand the differences in the weight that consumers versus companies place on different types of CSR domains according to their priorities, values, and opinions [
31].
The breadth of CSR definitions is reflected in the breadth of policies and activities that can be encompassed under the CSR umbrella, such as sustainable consumption and social issues [
32]. Alongside such activities, there has been a growing interest in how CSR influences consumers, albeit some theorists have proposed this is under-examined [
33]. Given potential benefits for corporate image and reputation of CSR, the importance of communications of CSR policy has also been recognized [
34,
35,
36]. However, Kim argues that focus has been given to macro rather than micro communications questions [
36], and thus understanding of the purpose of CSR remains ‘murky’ [
34]. Nevertheless, a key principle is that effective communication of CSR plays an important role in developing an ethical identity [
37], when the communication aligns with authenticity [
38].
Returning to the question of macro versus micro, despite the acknowledgment of the multidimensional nature of CSR, the majority of past research has focused on the macro- rather than micro-level and individual/single CSR dimensions [
33], and far too much attention has been paid to environmental factors to the detriment of other CSR categories such as social and economic [
19]. Our research has been designed to fill these gaps by taking a micro-level approach and holistically examining CSR by focusing on its multiple dimensions and examples of diverse policy categories. Moreover, given the limited literature on demographics and CSR, our research design included demographics to help clarify the current limited and contradictory findings in this area.
In consideration of the varied views of what constitutes CSR, we adopt a broad view of the topic in our research. Although we acknowledge the value of narrowly focused studies, our approach reflects the holistic nature of CSR. Further, as our concern is focused on consumers, our approach echoes research findings that suggest multiple attributes influence consumer choice [
19]. Thus, in relation to the focal brands used in our study (see methodology section), we have two criteria for topic inclusion; (i) the company considers the topic important enough to include discussion on their website, and (ii), the topic is related to business practices/policies that can be reasonably described as being driven by ethical considerations. This approach ensures breadth in the study and means that it reflects actual practice. Finally, we have structured the study in a way that examines knowledge of CSR both at the micro and macro levels.
Further, a significant concern is that past methodological approaches have employed a rather subjective and biased pathway to measuring subjective consumer CSR knowledge despite cautions such as Bhattacharya and Sen’s view of a “need for better measurement models of CSR that capture and estimate clearly the effects of a company’s CSR actions on its stakeholders, including its consumers” [
39] (p. 22). This consideration for moving toward alternative methods of measuring consumer-related aspects in connection to CSR has been seen recently; for example, Medina et. al.’s study on the use of neuroimaging to assess consumers’ true reactions and processing of CSR messages, which are at the core of how objective knowledge can be formed in consumer’s memory [
40].
Therefore, we have sought to ameliorate, as far as possible, some potential confounds in prior research. An initial way of doing this is to build on extant consumer CSR knowledge research [
41], and to design a study focused on obtaining objective CSR knowledge regarding the chosen focal brands. This is crucial as there can be a misalignment (‘miscalibration’) between objective and subjective knowledge, whereby individuals may mistakenly believe that they are knowledgeable about a particular subject when they are not [
42].
Such a differentiation is critical when asking questions about engagement with CSR as subjective measures (e.g., “I believe I know a lot about X company’s CSR” or “This company endeavors to protect the environment/ contributes to the development of community” [
43]) are more likely to elicit high-score responses from participants, which will inflate results. This is likely to happen as CSR is concerned with ethics which will prompt biases such as social desirability and impression management [
12]. However, by focusing on objective knowledge, the present study will allow us to ascertain whether participants are really engaging with CSR; if a person has a genuine interest in CSR, they should have at least some knowledge about some of the very well-known brands used in our study.
Using objective knowledge also addresses broader concerns about survey methodologies [
11,
14,
44]. While Pomering and Dolnicar’s earlier study sought to address some of these concerns, using a similar method to the one presented here [
33], a major flaw was their use of leading questions [
45]. Leading questions are a significant concern as this may develop what Feldman and Lynch describe as ‘self-generated validity’, whereby the questions and their sequence prompt the answers [
11].
Forbes and Avis [
14] extended concerns about self-generated validity and outline a long history of research, which demonstrates that research participants may ‘create’ their answers to questions in response to the questions themselves, rather than drawing on pre-existing attitudes or perceptions [
11,
46,
47,
48]. Forbes and Avis describe this kind of process as ‘construct creation’ and consider that the problem occurs when a topic is (1) ‘not salient for the participant’, (2) ‘the participant has no interest in the topic’; and/or (3) ‘the participant has (little or) no knowledge of the topic’ [
14] (p. 1818). As most marketing research aims at understanding attitudes and perceptions in the world outside of a research process, they point out that construct creation leads to ecologically invalid research [
49]. When considering the research methodology for this paper, it was consciously designed to focus on ecological validity and (at least) amelioration of the problems of construct creation.
With regards to ecological validity, the concern is that results in the ‘lab’ are informative about the world outside the ‘lab’ [
49]. For example, when shopping in a supermarket and choosing between brands, the only influences available to a consumer are local cues and the shopper’s own memory. This is important as, even if a person has a weak recollection of CSR that can be prompted by a survey question, if it cannot be recalled without a prompt in research, it will not be recalled unprompted in a shopping situation and thus cannot influence consumer behavior. Despite the issues with ecological validity, the majority of studies looking at CSR and consumer-related responses relied on experimental studies (lab or only survey-based studies) with scenarios developed for hypothetical or actual companies (e.g., Grimmer and Bingham’s study on companies’ environmental performance and consumers’ purchase intentions [
50]; Baskentli et al.’s study on consumers’ reactions to companies’ CSR domains activities) that can predispose consumers to a certain mindset and views and thus bias their responses [
30].
As such, we sought to avoid, as much as possible, any prompts in the question that might either result in a prompted recall or lead to outright construct creation [
14]. However, we nevertheless still tilted towards a greater representation of engagement with CSR as we artificially focused participants on the topic of CSR and did prompt to a very small degree; for each corporation, we listed the
general areas in which they had CSR policies (e.g., environment) to help participants organize their thoughts. This ‘tilt’ should be kept in mind when reviewing the results.
The new approach to the research in this paper provided surprising findings. In particular, for most consumers, there was very limited knowledge of the CSR for focal brands. Furthermore, our approach of examining from the micro-perspective provides some new insights into consumer engagement with CSR. This is clearly viewed as an important topic, both for theory and practice, given the large volume of academic literature and research devoted to CSR. As such, our first contribution is to identify a significant weakness in extant theory and research; although many companies are engaging in CSR activities, in relation to consumer behavior, their impact is often moot due to the failure to effectively communicate the activity. In addition to this, a further contribution is that the research looks at micro factors and provides holistic insights, for example, providing a more balanced examination of environmental CSR in relation to social and economic CSR. Lastly, the paper provides a significant contribution to research methodology. From the outset, the research design took heed of the risks of construct creation and implemented a methodology to avoid the risk of construct creation. The most important innovation in the methodology is to use objective knowledge as the focus of the research. This approach has allowed for the present research findings, which we believe better reflect the actuality of consumer perceptions of CSR.
2.2. Consumer Knowledge of CSR
Considering the view that the success of CSR strategies and activities is dependent on the knowledge of CSR initiatives and communications [
6], few studies have examined consumer knowledge of brands’ CSR activity/policy. This is despite research that found a ’surprisingly low’ level of “knowledge of the ethical and social issues around which firms are framing their CSR initiatives” [
33] (p. 182). However, before examining the extant literature on consumer knowledge of CSR it is important to note Brucks’ distinction between objective and subjective knowledge [
9]; the former is defined as actual knowledge stored in consumers’ memory and the latter is the knowledge that a person assumes they hold.
Research on environmental knowledge has made this distinction between consumer subjective and objective environmental knowledge (e.g., eco-labels and sustainable fishery [
51,
52,
53]) and found that for sustainable/food choices, high levels of both subjective and objective knowledge led to positive consumer attitude [
52,
54] but objective knowledge did not increase the likelihood of consuming organic products [
52].
However, the distinction between these two types of consumer knowledge cannot be clearly seen in the wider consumer CSR knowledge literature and, particularly, in relation to CSR policies rather than consumer products. Overall, policy knowledge research is limited and focused on subjective (e.g., the Kozar and Hiller Connell Likert scale statement: ‘I am knowledgeable about socially responsible clothing businesses’ [
55]) rather than objective knowledge. This is a significant issue and gap given that the two types of knowledge are distinct and influence differently the information processing and decision-making process [
9].
An additional issue with extant CSR literature is the interchangeable use of awareness and knowledge. Based on Information Processing Theory [
17], awareness is demonstrated at the attention stage while knowledge occurs at the encoding and recoding stage, i.e., knowledge is information stored in memory [
9]. For example, Beckman comments on the professed consumer interest in CSR versus the heterogeneity of awareness and knowledge of CSR (with most consumers unaware of CSR activities) [
5]. Furthermore, most research has examined awareness and knowledge of single CSR dimensions/pillars [
33], and few have attempted to dissociate between knowledge of distinct CSR dimensions (e.g., environmental, social, economic) and their relationship with consumers’ ethical evaluation of the company. One exception is Kozar and Hiller Connell’s research [
56], but their focus was on subjective knowledge, finding that participants were more (subjectively) knowledgeable about environmental than social CSR issues.
Some areas of CSR research have focused on corporate image research [
57], as organizations are aware of the importance of a positive global evaluation of the company by consumers. Such a positive image and evaluation has been claimed to enhance corporate reputation [
58], differentiation [
59], brand equity [
60], customer satisfaction [
61], positive consumer attitudes and loyalty [
39], purchase intentions [
62], and positive word-of-mouth [
60]. Nonetheless, there are also studies that claim such effects are non-existent or the findings are inconclusive [
63,
64,
65]. One explanation for the discrepancy may be that awareness of CSR and trust in relation to evaluations have been found to vary according to category [
17]. Alternatively, past studies suggest the absence of CSR activity awareness [
33,
39], and lack of CSR knowledge regarding what companies actually achieve via their CSR actions can lead to consumer skepticism [
35,
66], and are highly detrimental to corporate reputation. Thus, based on the literature reviewed above, we hypothesize that:
Hypothesis H1. Consumers’ objective knowledge of different individual types of CSR policies correlates with their global ethical evaluation of companies.
Hypothesis H2. There is a positive relationship between consumers’ overall objective knowledge of CSR policies and their global evaluation of the company.
Past research has found that consumers pay variable attention to certain types of CSR activities over others [
67], based on congruence with personal morals, interests, values, and priorities [
68]. Related to this, Pfau et al., found that for an organization with an existing positive image, CSR campaigns have had an incremental positive effect on this image and have increased the level of credibility among consumers but did not translate to higher levels of consumer CSR awareness [
57]. Overall, the literature seems to highlight that a larger number of CSR activities are not necessarily noticed or internalized by consumers. Therefore, we hypothesize that:
Hypothesis H3. Consumers’ knowledge of a larger number of CSR policies does not influence their ethical evaluation of the company.
Questions have been raised as to whether different consumer groups are more likely to be responsive to CSR efforts [
17], with early research indicating influence from variables such as age, gender, education, or market characteristics [
17,
69]. Regarding gender, Vicente-Molina, Fernández-Sáinz, and Izagirre-Olaizola’s study suggest that women are, on the whole, more pro-social than men [
16], and ethics research reports that women are more preoccupied with business ethics [
70] and Vermeir and van Kenhove found that women were less tolerant of ‘double standards’ in business ethics [
71]. This presents the possibility that they may be more receptive to CSR communication and thus may be more knowledgeable about CSR. Additionally, past literature found that women were more inclined to question and judge unethical actions than men [
71]. However, no literature directly examines gender differences in terms of broad evaluation of companies from a business ethics/CSR standpoint. Therefore, we hypothesize that:
Hypothesis H4. There is a positive correlation between gender and objective knowledge of CSR policies.
Hypothesis H5. Female consumers have more objective knowledge about CSR policies compared with male consumers.
Hypothesis H6. Female consumers have a more negative global evaluation of companies’ CSR policies compared to male consumers.
Regarding education, prior research has found in the case of cause-related marketing communications that higher-educated and higher-income groups of consumers are more likely to support such initiatives [
72]. This may be due to their higher level of awareness and understanding of CSR and specific activities. Studies looking at the influences of education on CSR-related areas are limited. One of these is that of Vicente-Molina, Fernández-Sáinz, and Izagirre-Olaizola who used a sample of university students to understand the significance of education in explaining pro-social behavior [
16]. They found the link between education and behavior to be complex though, with differences associated with either objective or subjective knowledge and psychological and gender variables. Based on the limited literature above we hypothesize that:
Hypothesis H7. There is a positive correlation between education and objective knowledge of CSR policies.
Hypothesis H8. There is a positive correlation between education and global evaluation of companies regarding their CSR.