Business Commons^™

Beyond Warm Glow: The Risk-Mitigating Effect Of Corporate Social Responsibility (Csr), Abhi Bhattacharya, Valerie Good, Hanieh Sardashti, John Peloza

Peer Reviewed Articles

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) positively impacts relationships between firms and customers. Previous research construes this as an outcome of customers’ warm glow that results from supporting firms’ benevolence. The current research demonstrates that beyond warm glow, CSR positively impacts firms’ sales through mitigating their customers’ perceptions of purchase risk. We demonstrate this effect across three conditions in which customers’ perceived risk of purchase is heightened, using both secondary data and two lab experiments. Under conditions of greater purchase risk (i.e., recessions, a service context, and longer-term consumer commitments), CSR positively impacts both sales and customer purchase intentions to a greater …