The effect of corporate hypocrisy on consumer retaliation

Abstract

In recent years, more and more enterprises have realised the importance of corporate social responsibility. However, the implementation of CSR activities is not smooth, and not all enterprises are able to be consistent in doing CSR activities. Many companies have been exposed to negative news related to CSR and thus labelled as hypocrites. Consumers are far more sensitive to negative news than positive news. Therefore, correctly recognising the impact of hypocritical CSR on companies is a topic that needs to be taken seriously in the field of CSR today.

The thesis proposes a research framework and research content from the perspective of consumers' reactions to corporate hypocrisy. Different types of corporate hypocrisy are used as independent variables, consumer active and passive hate as mediating variables, consumer direct and indirect retaliation as dependent variables, and emotional intelligence as a moderating variable. The thesis uses online interviews (n=10) to determine the context of the research and uses the literature method to form a mature scale questionnaire and uses the online questionnaire method to collect the research samples (n=302), and finally analyses samples by SPSS29, R, Amos29 by descriptive statistical analysis, reliability test, regression analysis, mediation effect test and moderating effect test to explore the psychological and behavioural response mechanisms of consumers to corporate hypocrisy.

The study’s results showed that corporate hypocrisy triggers consumers' hate and retaliation behaviours. Compared with corporate behavioural hypocrisy, corporate moral hypocrisy has a more significant effect on consumer hate and retaliation behaviour. Consumer hate mediates the relationship between corporate hypocrisy and consumer retaliation. Emotional intelligence plays a moderating role between consumer hate and consumer retaliation. As consumers' emotional intelligence increases, the positive effect of consumer hate on consumer retaliation behaviour diminishes. These findings enrich the study of corporate hypocrisy from the consumer perspective and provide theoretical support and practical management suggestions for enterprises to correctly recognise the harm caused by corporate hypocrisy.