Study On The Relationship Between Corporate Social Responsibility And Customer Loyalty

Corporate social responsibility is firstly raised during the twenties of the last century in the United States. While in China, researches covering this field come into being very late. In recent years, some enterprises ignore the value of social morality for the sake of maximizing their own benefits in the developing process, which results in a large series of problems. For instance, some enterprises have a low sense of business ethics, lack business integrity and do not pay enough attention to their social responsibility, etc. All of these problems expose the truth that Chinese enterprises are not able to take their overall social responsibility in the developing process. Corporate social responsibility has rapidly become a hot spot for the public. The issue whether enterprises should consider profit as the only goal regardless of social responsibility or not has aroused a wide discussion. Also, the issue of customer loyalty which is closely related to corporate profit has been a research topic of many scholars.Based on some domestic and foreign scholars’research theories, this research paper makes an extensive study of corporate social responsibility in five aspects from the perspective of stakeholders:shareholders, employees, consumers, communities, and environment. Meanwhile, from the perspective of consumers, it studies what kind of effect on the factor of consumer loyalty will appear if enterprises assume responsibility for the above five stakeholders. In addition, the term "corporate identity" is introduced and regarded as an intermediary variable in order to conduct a study on whether corporate social reliability has a great influence upon customer loyalty through the factor of corporate identity.This study regards consumers as its research subjects. On the basis of the existing literature research, it constructs a research model and proposes research hypotheses among the three factors-corporate social responsibility, corporate identity and customer loyalty.Dairy industry is considered as the research subject in the process of study. Some consumers who often buy dairy products are investigated in order to know about their understanding of corporate social responsibility and customer loyalty in the way of questionnaires. Statistical analysis results lead to the following conclusions:there is a positive correlation between corporate social responsibility and customer loyalty; there is a positive correlation between corporate social responsibility and corporate identity; there is a positive correlation corporate identity and customer loyalty; corporate identity mediates the relation between corporate social responsibility and customer loyalty. Also, the research studies the influence of demographic variables on corporate social responsibility, corporate identity and customer loyalty in the way of using variance analysis. Research results lead to the following conclusions:Consumers with different levels of education have significantly different ideas in terms of the visibility of corporate identity; consumers in different occupations hold different opinions on enterprises’ responsibility for consumers and customer loyalty; consumers with income differentials have different understanding of enterprises’ responsibility for consumers. At last, the study draws some related research conclusions, points out the insufficiency, and suggests directions for future research.