The purpose of the present study was to examine the effectiveness of two Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) campaigns--the Cause-Related Marketing (CRM) campaign and the Corporate Sponsorship (CS) campaign--on the favorable response of consumers to the brands in a social media setting, such as Facebook. From the perspective of impression management theory, the current study suggested that consumers would be mobilized to present socially favorable images to their friends by participating in joining and inviting activities on a social media brand page featuring the CSR campaigns. Furthermore, the present study integrated the roles of friends and brand image into the impression management context in social media.A 3 (the CSR campaign condition: CRM campaign, CS campaign, or control) × 2 (the type of self-friend gender composition: same versus different) × 2 (the type of brand: symbolic versus practical) between-subjects experiment design was employed. The dependent variables were the consumer intentions to join the brand page and invite friends to the brand page in social media. The outcome expectancy of consumers to look favorable to their friends was explored as a mediator. To ensure the ecological validity of the experimental setting, all of the experiment procedures were done online. A total of 720 college students randomly selected at Michigan State University participated as the final sample.The results of the Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA) indicated that CRM campaigns resulted in the more favorable response of consumers to the brand than CS campaigns, eventhough any kind of CSR campaign, either CRM or CS, led to a greater response as opposed to the absence of CSR campaigns. It was further found that even though consumers were less likely to join the practical brand pages than the symbolic brand pages in general, the effectiveness of the CSR campaign was more pronounced on the practical brand pages than on the symbolic brand pages. The mediation analyses further confirmed that the consumer expectancy to look favorable was a significant mediator working as a psychological mechanism underlying the relationship between the CSR campaign conditions and the consumer response to brands.The findings of the present study are consistent with the previous suggestion that the public display nature of social media encourages consumers to deliver favorable images of themselves to their friends. The findings of the current study further indicate that the impression management perspective could be one of the promising theoretical approaches to enhance our understanding of consumer participation in CSR campaigns in social media. Such findings are expected to initiate scholastic interest in the effectiveness of CSR campaigns on the favorable response of consumers to the brand in the social media setting.Given the fact that today's marketers are eager to extend their CSR campaigns into social media channels, the findings of the present study would provide practical answers for the marketers, particularly pertaining to how to use social media strategically to enhance consumer participation in CSR campaigns. Therefore, the current experimental study would shed light on how the effective provision of CSR campaigns using social media channels could be a potential marketing tool to increase the favorable responses of consumers to the brand, and further cultivate the active engagement of consumers to the brand.
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