Consumer Purchase Intention消费者购买意愿.pdfVIP

Public Relations Journal Vol. 5, No. 3 ISSN 1942-4604 © 2011 Public Relations Society of America Understanding the Effect of Corporate Social Responsibility on Consumer Purchase Intention Melissa D. Dodd, and Dustin W. Supa, Ph.D. Modern corporate social responsibility (CSR) has many names, such as corporate citizenship, corporate philanthropy, corporate giving, corporate community involvement, community relations, community affairs, community development, corporate responsibility, global citizenship and corporate social marketing. Likewise, the definition of CSR changes from researcher to researcher. For example, CSR can be generally defined as the organization incurring responsibilities to society beyond profit maximization. (Pava and Krausz 1995, 1) A more specific definition of CSR is offered by Business for Social Responsibility: “operating a business in a manner that meets or exceeds the ethical, legal, commercial, and public expectations that society has of business” (Kotler and Lee 2005, 3). LITERATURE REVIEW Purchase intention can most readily be understood as the likelihood that a consumer intends to purchase a product. The concept of purchase intention is rooted in psychological and behavioral studies; therefore, the theory of reasoned action works well for identifying and understanding associations between CSR and purchase intentions for this study. Armitage and Christian (2004) explained that the theory of reasoned action holds that “behavior is solely dependent on personal agency (i.e., the formation of an intention), and that control over behavior (e.g., personal resources or environmental determinants of behavior) is relatively unimportant” (p. 6). In other words, the theory of reasoned action was designed to deal with relatively simple behaviors in which the prediction of behavior required only the formation of an intention. Although the core of CSR is concerned