기업의 사회적 책임 활동의 대상과 소비자의 조절초점이 구매한 제품 반응에 미치는 영향

This study explored how the target of corporate social responsibility (CSR) affects consumers’ responses to purchased products depending on their motivational tendency. Previous research regarding regulatory focus theory says that prevention-focused consumers have a strong tendency to form their product attitude based on perceived similarity among objects and have thinking styles with lower level construal whereas promotion-focused consumers understand relationships among objects and judge them from a long-term perspective. This study investigated that the ingroup bias caused by whether the activity of domestic firms’ CSR was domestic or foreign would influence differently consumers’ responses to their purchased products by their motivational tendencies. To achieve this goal, an experiment was conducted an experiment based on the scenario which participants were asked to imagine purchase a jacket. The results showed that prevention-focused participants displayed a more favorable attitude and higher purchase intention when they learned their purchased brand engaged in domestic- versus foreign-focused CSR. In contrast, promotion-focused participants did not showed different responses regardless of the CSR target. Additionally, perceived quality was attributable to the interactional effect. As this study focused on ingroup bias from the perspective of information processing and applied it to the CSR area, it has practical implications for executing CSR.