The Effect of Corporate Social Responsibility Activities on Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty: Exploring Affective and Cognitive Mechanisms

This study examined how consumer responses to corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities affect customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Existing CSR-related studies have suggested that CSR activities affected various dependent variables, such as corporate trust, customer satisfaction, corporate value, corporate evaluation, customer loyalty, and product evaluation. However, this study focused on the affective and cognitive pathways by which CSR activities affected consumer responses and verified the effects on corporate reputation through the affective path of reciprocity variables and the cognitive path of consumer cynicism. It was found that CSR activities had positive effects on reciprocity but negative effects on customer cynicism. Reciprocity and cynicism were found to have significant effects on corporate reputation. These results suggest that corporate CSR activities could reduce cynicism and induce reciprocal emotions in consumers. In addition, it was found that corporate reputation did not significantly affect customer satisfaction but did significantly affect customer loyalty. This study has academic significance because it examined the two mechanisms of reciprocity and cynicism by which the CSR activities of companies affect consumer reactions.