Perception of corporate social responsibility among devout and nondevout customers in an Islamic society

What is it about?

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become a very common buzz word in the field of marketing since many years. This empirical paper assesses the attitude of devout and nondevout customers towards CSR in the context of a religious society. As making clear distinction between devout and nondevout customers may have associated measurement problems in a single-religion-dominated country, this paper initiates the discussion of peculiarity between two important religiosity measures, that is, observation based and solicited. A hypothetical story board with embedded CSR information in a scenario supporting a religious cause is presented to the highly and less religious subjects in text written form. The scenario is followed by questions pertaining to their religious behaviors and attitude towards the company in question. The results illustrate that highly religious customers show slightly greater preference towards CSR as compared to less religious customers and the observation-based religiosity measure has a tendency of more reliability if the researchers have deep cultural and religious know-how about a specific society. Results of this study might help international marketers about choosing a particular cause under its umbrella CSR activities particularly when entering in a highly religious society dominated by a single religion.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

The current study tries to explore how the level of religiousness lays the foundation of shaping a consumer’s moral behavior and how it influences the consumer’s choices towards CSR. Uygur (2009), while studying customers’ attitude, divides the Turkish business individuals into pious and secular groups. On the other hand, Brammer et al. (2007) divides the individuals into religious and nonbelievers. This study divides individual customers into less religious and highly religious groups, as Rashid and Ibrahim (2008) do, and tries to observe varying attitude patterns towards the CSR efforts by a company in a religious setting. Moreover, measuring a subject’s religiosity level has mixed approaches. This study challenges the prevailing method of soliciting subject’s religiosity level (because of associated social desirability biasness) and proposes an alternate method which is based on the researchers’ own observation.

Perspectives