Corporate Social Responsibility Fit And Consumer Brand Attitude: Research On The Conditional Indirect Effect And Moderated Effect

For consumers, brand meets their needs through providing productions and services withspecific attribute. It plays an essential role in differentiating products from competitors’through itssymbolic nature. However, increasing competition is making the brand difficult to differentiateitself from competitors using the traditional attributes; companies need attractive marketingalternatives to improve brands’ symbolic values, to make the most positive brand attitude for theconsumers. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is used as a strategy that provides acompetitive differentiation opportunity concerned by both academic and managerial. At the sametime, CSR initiatives represent a wide spectrum of activities, including cause-related marketing,cause promotion, social marketing, corporate philanthropy, community volunteering, which makethe practitioners difficult to find the perfect one that benefit the companies.In order to solve the above-mentioned problem, both researchers and practitioners emphasizethe importance of CSR fit. Perceived fit is defined as “the perceived match or logical connectionbetween a cause and the company’s production line, corporate identity, position, target market,mission and values”. Although most studies have empirically demonstrated the positiverelationship between the perception of fit and the outcomes of CSR, some studies show that therelationship between the fit and consumer evaluation is uncertain. In fact, there are manycompanies engage in some unfit social cause even succeed. Regardless of corporate reputation,CSR fit will not affect consumer attitude. In addressing this dilemma and extending existingfindings, by introducing two key variables called social cause affinity and consumer altruisticvalues, the article explained the conditional effect of CSR fit on consumer brand attitude throughaltruistic attributions.The concept of fit defined in existing research comes from brand extension or allianceliteratures, which concerns more on the intangible resources. However, for practitioners, the perceived fit not only involves intangible elements, but also tangible ones. In existing research,most studies discussed the effect of the level of CSR fit, but few studies have investigated theeffect of the type of CSR fit. Based on the literature review, the paper examined the effect of CSRfit from two aspects which are functional fit and image fit and investigated the dual nature of CSRfit.Based on the theories of brand alliance and effect transfer model, most of the existing studieshave explained the effect of fit, whose premise is the existence of the positive emotion about thecollaborator. But most of the existing studies ignored the feature of the social cause. Ignorance ofkey factor may be one of the reasons about the divergence. So the social cause affinity can explainthe conditional effect of CSR fit on consumer brand attitude via altruistic attributions.Consumers’ response to CSR is based on the ethics of the object. Consumers’ values playedan important part in ethical consumption. The existing literatures on CSR fit mostly investigatedthe factors about the enterprises, but not concerned the consumers’ characteristics. While thesymbol values provides by CSR fit for brand play an essential role in consumer self-construal, butnot all of it. So, it is difficult to obtain the same conclusion about the effect of CSR fit whenignored the characteristics of consumers. Therefore, the paper introduced the altruistic values, inorder to solve the contradictions in the existing research.Drawing on the previous studies, the paper used the experimental method to solve the abovequestions. The result shows that the functional fit and image fit positively effect altruisticattributions and consumer brand attitude. Compared to image fit, the functional fit has a strongereffect on consumer brand attitude. As to the mediating effect of altruistic attributions, the resultsshow that the functional fit and image fit not only have a direct effect on consumer brand attitude,but also have an indirect effect through altruistic attribution. As to the moderating effect of socialcause affinity, the results show that it positive moderates the effect of functional fit on altruisticattributions, but negative moderates the influence of image fit. Specifically, the functional fit has apositive effect on altruistic attributions and the effect of image fit on altruistic attributions isnon-significant when the level of social cause affinity is high; when the level of social causeaffinity is low, the results are opposite. As to the moderating effect of altruistic values, the resultsshow that the altruistic values moderates the relationship between altruistic attributions andconsumer brand attitude. Specifically, for consumers with high levels of altruistic values, in order to avoid being deceived, individuals will more rigorous to assess the CSR information. Altruisticattributions positive effect consumer brand attitude. But for consumers with low levels of altruisticvalues, CSR does not threaten consumers’ self-identity, and they can also understand the multiplemotives, so the effect of altruistic attributions on brand attitude is not significant. For theconditional indirect effect of CSR fit on consumer brand attitude through altruistic attributions, theresults show that the indirect effects of functional fit and image fit on consumer brand attitudethrough altruistic attributions are depended on social cause affinity and altruistic values.Specifically, when the level of social cause affinity is high, functional fit has an indirect effect onconsumer brand attitude via altruistic attributions, but the indirect effect is not significant whenthe level of social cause affinity is low. The effect of image fit is opposite. For the consumers withhigh level of altruistic values, the indirect effect is significant, but not for the consumers with lowlevel of altruistic values.The empirical results show that it is necessary to distinguish the types of CSR fit. The paperintegrated the results of consumer attributions in CSR field. According to the discount principle ofattribution theory, the paper investigates the relationship between CSR fit and consumer brandattitude via altruistic attributions. This provides a new perspective for the future studies. The studyalso reveals the veil the conditional effect of CSR fit on consumer brand attitude through altruisticattributions. The results provide a new perspective for solving the contradiction in existingresearch. At the same time, the results also enriched the existing results in this field. In the end, thepaper also has some practical implications for managers to choose social cause and to make CSRcommunication strategy.