Relationship between Customer Perception about CSR activities and Purchase Intention: The Role of CSR Communication Channels

With the incorporation of businesses as major players in a country’s economy and society, Corporate Social Responsibility is becoming a very important aspect of corporate activity. This field is greatly understudied and only limited research has been done on the consequences of conducting CSR activities through different channels of communication. This thesis therefore contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between customer perception and purchase intention in the setting of CSR activities towards online and offline channels through both theoretical and practical aspects. The purpose of our study is to investigate which channel may incur better performance for different dimensions of customer perception, and how to utilize and combine online and offline channels to achieve an optimal outcome. In our study, surveys were employed and 175 valid responses were collected for quantitative analysis in order to test hypotheses related to customer perception and purchase intention. Furthermore, semi-structured interviews were conducted to better explain the reasons behind the results. According to our findings, communication through an offline channel plays an important role when conducting CSR activities on satisfaction and consequent purchase intention. Correspondingly, the online channel performs better on customer trust. However, limitations still exist in this paper rendering the explanatory power of our model partially sufficient. Further research can focus more on explaining the reason why online and offline channels have a different effect on purchase intention by altering parameters of our experiment (sample composition etc.). For instance, why awareness has no relationship with purchase intention via both channels and how to better enhance the contribution of customer trust and satisfaction in purchase intention respectively through online and offline channel