The price of social responsibility: Does inflation expectation apply? An approach to corporate social responsibility competitive value

• Autor(a) principal: Ribeiro, Abel da Fonseca
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/30396
• topic: Inflação -- inflation; Willingness to pay a premium price; Responsabilidade social das empresas -- Corporate social responsibility; Brand equity; Disponibilidade para pagar preço premium; Equidade da marca

CSR has become an ethical and business imperative given the migration of market towards sustainable consumption. Hence, companies have been endeavoring to associate their brands to social responsibility, intending (also) to instrumentally leverage their brand equity and return. However, this research has been mainly deployed in socio-economic contexts of relative well-being in which economic stability has been the watermark as regards consumers’ expectations. Recent events challenged this economic stability in the form of inflation and a negative outlook as regards purchasing power. Thus, we asked to which extent the added value attached to a socially responsible brand persists in this new context. This study is design to understand how extensively consumers are available to pay premium price for products of socially responsible companies, when considering their inflation expectations as well as their purchasing power expectations as boundary conditions. With a sample of 141 coffee consumers this study tests a moderated mediation model that links CSR brand to the intention to pay premium via Brand equity, while testing the interaction effect that expected inflation and purchasing power changes have on this mediation. Findings suggest the mediation is effective and that it endures even when the inflationary expectations and the purchasing power loss are observed. These findings are discussed at the light of theory and their implications drafted as regards both the theoretical and applied domains.