Corporate social responsibility: a consumer psychology perspective

• Consumers support brands engaged in CSR through purchase and other pro-company behaviors.
• These responses are based on reputational effects and changes in product performance perceptions.
• These responses stem from both self-serving and other-serving motives and are accompanied by emotions.
• These responses hinge on many CSR-specific, company-specific and consumer-specific contingencies.

This paper reviews the substantial body of work on corporate social responsibility (CSR), including the synonymous domains of cause-related marketing and ethical consumption, to synthesize the diverse findings on consumer responses to CSR. CSR is capable of engendering a range of company-favoring perceptions and behaviors, driven by both consumers’ CSR-related motivations (e.g., consumer–company identification, affective motives) and their CSR-guided product perceptions. As well, the paper documents the plethora of CSR initiative-specific, company-specific, and consumer-specific factors that modulate consumers’ reactions to CSR initiatives, and ends with a discussion of some key future research directions.