Consumer perceptions of corporate social responsibility in town shopping centres and their influence on shopping evaluations

This paper investigates the effects of retailer and town centre actions to demonstrate corporate social responsibility (CSR) on consumers’ evaluations of town shopping centres. Examples of CSR actions are donations to charities, support for schools or cultural or sports events and demonstrations of concern for the natural environment. Recent research literature suggests such actions can have positive effects on the attractiveness of retail stores, and hence are a potential basis of competitive advantage. This paper investigates if similar effects occur for evaluations of town shopping centres. Hypotheses about the mediating and moderating effects of CSR are tested in two conjoint experiments conducted on shoppers in the UK. The results shows that the explanatory and predictive performance of destination choice models for shopping can improve if they include indicators of a centre's CSR performance but the effects of CSR attributes are small compared to the effects of non-CSR attributes.