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Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 05/18/2012 06:12 AM
University of Wollongong
Research Online
Faculty of Commerce - Papers
Faculty of Commerce
2008
Assessing the prerequisite of successful CSR
implementation: Are consumers aware of CSR
initiatives?
A. Pomering
University of Wollongong, alanp@uow.edu.au
Sara Dolnicar
University of Wollongong, sarad@uow.edu.au
Publication Details
This article was originally published as Dolnicar, S and Pomering, A, Assessing the prerequisite of successful CSR implementation:
Are consumers aware of CSR initiatives?, Journal of Business Ethics, 2009, 1-17. The original publication is available at
www.springerlink.com.
Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the
University of Wollongong. For further information contact Manager
Repository Services: morgan@uow.edu.au.
Assessing the prerequisite of successful CSR implementation: Are
consumers aware of CSR initiatives?
Abstract
Corporate social responsibility has received a large amount of research attention over the last decade. Results
indicate that consumers are influenced by corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives of businesses if
they are aware of them. Whether consumers are in fact aware of CSR initiatives, however, has not been
studied in the past. This ‘missing link’ in CSR research makes the conclusions that CSR affects consumer
behaviour questionable. Consequently, a number of researchers (e.g. Maignan 2001; Mohr, Webb, and
Harris 2001) have called for empirical studies to determine the extent to which consumers are actually aware
of the CSR records of corporations and the social issues engaged within those CSR records. The present
study fills this gap for the Australian banking industry sector. Results from a qualitative study with bank
managers and a quantitative study with consumers indicate that the awareness levels of CSR activities are low,
despite the fact that banks do actively promote their CSR activities. This leads to the conclusion that...