When do social alliances pay off? How the effect on corporate image depends on consumers’ prosocial attitudes

Abstract: This study examines the potential benefits for a company's corporate image in forming a social alliance with a social profit organization. Drawing on Associative Network theory, consumers' attitude towards the social profit partner should transfer to the company's corporate image. In addition, this article explores the moderating role of consumers' attitude towards helping others and their global attitude towards charitable organizations on the strength of this relationship. An online experiment (n = 133) is conducted to test the hypotheses. The results show that, in a social alliance, a positive attitude towards the social profit partner positively impacts the corporate image of the company. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the more positive consumers' general attitude towards charitable organizations, the more positive their attitude towards a company involved in a social alliance. Consumers' attitude towards helping others positively moderates the effect of attitude towards the social profit on attitude towards the company. As a result, this study adds to a better understanding of how and when companies can strengthen their corporate image through social alliances

Epistemological evolution of corporate social responsibility in marketing

Corporate social responsibility, Marketing literature, Epistemological evolution, State-of-the-art, Content analysis, Theory development,