UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ IMPACT OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND CORPORATE REPUTATION ON CONSUMER ATTITUDE TOWARD FOOD PRODUCTS AND CONSUMER BEHAVIORAL INTENTION Cao Thị Hải Âu MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2014 123doc UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ IMPACT OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY AND CORPORATE REPUTATION ON CONSUMER ATTITUDE TOWARD FOOD PRODUCTS AND CONSUMER BEHAVIORAL INTENTION Cao Thị Hải Âu ID: 22110003 MASTER OF BUSINESS (Honours) SUPERVISOR: LƯU TRỌNG TUẤN, PhD. Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2014 123doc Acknowledgement I would like express my sincere thankfulness to Dr. LuuTrong Tuan who is my research supervisor. He helped me to understand the purpose of study research, as well as the process of research.
Thanks to his help, I can understand clearly about the topic I like and I can complete my thesis. His guidance helps me a lot in performing the thesis, studying theories, and collecting the data. This thesis could not be finished without his supporting. I would like to thank Prof.
Nguyen DinhTho and Prof. Nguyen Dong for giving me helpful advices to correct my thesis. I am grateful to Dr. Nguyen Thi Mai Trang and Dr.
Nguyen ThiNguyetQue with the useful comments for the thesis. I would like to thank to all staffs of ISB for supporting me during the thesis processes with informing and guiding accurately and on time. I would also like to thank to all of my family members, friends who supported and are by my side throughout my life. 123doc Abstract Corporate social responsibility is still a new definition to Vietnam, the paper studies about its influence on consumer attitude and behavioral intention.
To investigate the relationships, the paper needs to search these relationships through corporate reputation. The data is collected with a sample of 203 customers at super markets with the method mall-intercept. Those customers are choosing food products and asked permit to interview. The paper will prove these relationships, the corporate social responsibility effects on corporate reputation, and corporate reputation effects on consumer attitude, and consumer attitude influences on consumer behavioral intention.
However, the corporate social responsibility does not effect on consumer attitude. The suggested hypotheses are proved by data analysis and findings help to the roles of these variables. 123doc Contents Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION.3 Research Objective and Questions:. 4 Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW .1 Corporate Social Responsibility: .3 Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate Reputation: .4 Consumer Attitude toward the Company’s Food Products: .5 Corporate Social Responsibility and Consumer Attitude toward the Company’s Food Products: .6 Corporate Reputation and Consumer Attitude toward the Company’s Food Products: .7 Consumer Behavioral Intention: .8 Consumer Attitude toward the Company’s Food Products and Consumer Behavioral Intention: .2 Survey Research Method:.
35 Chapter 4: RESULTS AND DISCUSSION .2 Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA): .3 Regression Analysis and Multiple Regression Analysis:.2 Exploratory factor analysis (EFA): .2 Testing hypotheses 2 and hypothesis 3:. 53 Chapter 5: CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATION. 62 123doc Chapter 1: INTRODUCTION 1.1 Introduction: The paper investigates corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate reputation, consumer attitude toward the company’s food products, and consumer behavioral intention; and their relationships. Creyer and Ross (1997) study the relationship between corporate social responsibility and consumer attitude toward the company’s food products, they found a positive relationship between them.
According to Zaharia (2013), corporate social responsibility helps companies to build consumer product responses and product attitudes, corporate social responsibility also effects on product attributes. Besides, corporate reputation also influences on consumer attitude toward the company’s food products, as Schwager (2004) defines reputation related to attitude. Sen and Bhattacharya (2001) say corporate social responsibility is a key component of a firm’s marketing toolbox to build their corporate reputation; that means a positive relationship between corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation. The research focuses on corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation influence on consumer attitude toward the company’s food products.
Attitude changing will lead to behavior changing of consumer (Eagly&Chaiken, 1993), consumer attitude toward the company’s food products and consumer behavioral intention has a positive relationship. Both theories of reasoned action (Fishbein&Ajzen, 1975) and of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991) consider behavioral intentions to be the most proximal determinant of behavior, and behavioral intention is proposed to be influenced attitude that consumer attitude toward the 1 123doc company’s food products towards consumer behavioral intention. By looking and considering corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation of a company, consumer can attitude toward their food products; that leads to buy and consume their food products as consumer behavioral intention. As well as, producers can change their images by focusing on building their corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation to lead to consumer attitude toward the company’s food products and gain customer’s consumer behavioral intention.2 Research Problem: Vietnam is a communist country that has opened the economics door to integrate into the global economy by joining ASEAN in 1995, AFTA in 1996; especially Vietnam has joined WTO since 2007 that opened a new way for Vietnamese economy, as well as gave many opportunities and challenges to Vietnam companies.
Besides the advantages the economics integrating has given, Vietnam had to face many disadvantages, difficulties in the process of its development. Vietnam has allowed foreign products that exported to Vietnamese market. Vietnamese consumers contact with many trademarks of products, as well as variety quality of products. Vietnamese also has another consideration about Vietnamese products.
One of industrial is food manufacturing is affected. Vietnamese customers don’t believe in Vietnam food products. They prefer foreign food products such as milk products for babies; they believe that food products from famous trade mark have good quality and they trust the guarantee that the famous organizations posted in the food products’ labels. The Vietnam food production lost their customer because they lose consumer trust.
To attract customers to Vietnam food 2 123doc products, the Vietnam food productions need to build their own strategy to gain customer trust. The paper supposes to give two supposed factors that maybe influences to attitude toward food products of costumers in Vietnam market. Additions, the link between attitude and intention has been explained by Ajzen (1991), and this relationship is also improved a positive one. The paper studies the indirect impact of supposed variables corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation on consumer behavioral intention through consumer attitude toward food products.
Every company has its own aim; that is profit. The profit comes from consuming products. That their marketing strategy. All of four variables in the paper are areas of marketing.
Because food producers lack of corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation, customers don’t care their food products and avoid buying their food product. The paper investigates the relationships of these variables. Food producers can build their corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation to influence on consumer attitude toward the company’s food products. From that, customers can buy their food products, as previous research about the positive relationship between consumer attitude toward the company’s food products and consumer behavioral intention.
The purpose of building corporate social responsibility is to enhance corporate reputation, also to gain consumer attitude toward the company’s food products. Food producers can attract consumer behavioral intention by their corporate social responsibility and corporate based on the positive relationship of consumer attitude toward the company’s food products and consumer behavioral intention. Corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation help food producers to build a long term 3 123doc relationship with the customers based on gaining consumer attitude toward the company’s food products; the customers would think about their brand when making a decision on buying food products.3 Research Objective and Questions: The aim of research is to explore the relationships between supposed factors and studied variables. Simultaneously, the study shows how the independent variables influence on the dependent variables.
In additions, the data analysis will help to improve these assumptions. How do the supposed factors influence on consumer behavioral intention? 2. What kind of relationship between independent variables and dependent variables? 3. How strong are these correlations? To answer the above questions, the author performs step by step to find the final result.
The process is described in research process section. The organized form of the paper is indicated in the next section.4 Research Structure: Following the concepts of a typical research paper, the concept of the study is performed as the list of chapters below: Chapter 1 illustrates the introduction of the paper, including four sections such as: introduction, research problem, research questions, research Structure. 4 123doc Chapter 2 presents literature review, which indicates the contents of concepts and the relationships. The supposed hypotheses and the model of the paper are listed in this chapter.
Chapter 3 details the process of methodology that describes 8 steps in total. In succession, these are research process, research problem, research approach, survey research method, questionnaire design, sampling method, data collection, and data preparation. Chapter 4 shows the method used to analysis the data and the way of data analysis, as well as gives the results. This chapter describes how the data is analyzed by using data single and multiple regression analysis of SPSS 1.
Chapter 5 summarizes the consequences of the paper, as well as gives recommends, and supposed the future directions. 5 123doc Chapter 2: LITERATURE REVIEW The chapter explains the concepts of the paper and describes the relationship between variables by using the ideas from previous researchers. It shows the previous studies that mention about the impact of independent variables affecting on dependent variables.1 Corporate Social Responsibility: There are diversity definitions to describe corporate social responsibility. One of them is a concept whereby firms incorporate environmental and social concerns in their business performances on a voluntary base; this definition is given by the European Commission that published a Green paper in 2001.
According to Brown and Dacin (1997), an entity’s activities and its social duties and stakeholder obligations describe its corporate social responsibility. These activities include responsible business practices, employee volunteering, corporate giving and cause-related marketing; a company which has social responsible goals, also wishes to bring benefits to its stakeholders that are its employees, individuals, customers, organization and community (Berger, Cunningham and Drumwright, 2007). There are many definitions of corporate social responsibilities. Angelidis and Ibrahim (1993) define corporate social responsibility is the policy and practice of corporate social involvement to satisfy social needs.
They find the three types of corporate social responsibilities in their research; these types are sponsorship, cause- related marketing, and philanthropy. These activities show organizational empathy to the 6 123doc community, as well as its stakeholders. Meanwhile in Carroll’s Pyramid Model, he mentions four different kinds of responsibilities indicating CSR; these are economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic (Snider, Hill, & Martin, 2003). Customers carefully consider a brand, which promises social commitments to their consumers, who would be influenced about their brand reputation (Pérez, Alcañiz, & Herrera, 2009).
Jamali (2008) says that organizations use corporation social responsibility as a mean to develop itself, to attract stakeholder’s attention, and contribute to develop social standards. Meanwhile corporate social responsibility is also defined an engagement of an entity to enhance higher and higher living conditions while still protecting benefit of the company, as well as of people both within and outside the firm (Hopkins, 2007). Corporate social responsibility is also known as the way the organization treat its stakeholders and community ethically and responsibly. As Carroll (1979) writes, making good profits is a social responsibility when the company thinks that its business is a part of social economic system.
He also gives four dimensions, such as economic, legal, ethical, and philanthropic, that described in the model of corporate social responsibility. Where the economic responsibility involves to getting profits, the company is responsible to the benefits of stakeholders. The ethical responsibility means about following the laws of government, relevant international, state, federal, and local. Meanwhile ethical responsibility talks about moral of an organization; it tries to avoid harm or social injury.