Corporate Social Responsibility as Strategic Crisis Communication in an Economic Crisis among Financial Service Organizations

This study investigated how U.S. financial services organizations (FSOs) changed the way they strategically used corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages as crisis management strategies in their advertising during and after the economic crisis of 2007-2008. Data for this study were collected by analyzing the content of 3,351 advertisements of five business and finance magazines published in the U.S. from 2005 through 2011. The 7 years were chosen in an attempt to identify changes in CSR messages before and during the economic crisis. The results of this study revealed three significant findings; (a) the economic crisis led to an increase in the use of CSR-focused advertising strategy across all FSOs rather than non-CSR strategy that was more frequently used before the crisis; (b) among the four CSR dimensions, economic responsibility dimension was far more frequently used before and during the crisis; and (c) however, each FSO used the dimensions in a different way based on the different nature of each one’s business.