Investigating Trust to Bridge the Attitude–Behaviour Gap: A Study of Socially Responsible Customers in a Low Trust Society

Abstract

While corporate social responsibility (CSR) is widely investigated in the Western world, the CSR attitude–behaviour gap is still wide and underexplored in the context of developing countries. Limited empirical research has tried to examine how CSR customer awareness (CA) may lead to subjective cognitive attributes such as customer’s trust on CSR, which in turn leads to behavioural outcomes (e.g., purchase intention) in a low trust society. To address these shortcomings in the literature, this article builds on the stakeholder theory to examine the influence of CSR CA on purchase intention (PI), considering the facilitatory roles of customer’s trust on CSR when company evaluation (CE) and product association (PA) moderate the mediated relationship. The data were collected in Pakistan from a sample of 321 socially responsible customers. Hypothesized relationships were tested using structural equation modelling using mediation and moderated mediation analysis. The results demonstrated that customers’ trust on CSR mediated the relationship between CSR CA and PI. PA was insignificantly different for low and high components of PA on the CA–trust–PI link compared to CE that was significantly different for the CA–trust–PI link. This indicates that, when socially responsible customers process CSR information, CE plays an important role regarding the associative attributes on the CA–trust–PI link than PA in low trust societies. The discussion and implications conclude the research study.