CSR Practices Performance and their Visibility by Consumers: a Study with Spanish Food Products

Faculty of Economics and Business Studies, Campus de Vegazana s/n, 24071 Leon, Spain

^* Corresponding author: cesar.sahelices@unileon.es

Abstract

Nowadays, companies around the world have engaged in an increasing number of CSR practices. This tendency is expected to continue growing up, becoming a mainstream global issue more and more relevant to business organizations in forthcoming years due to two main reasons. Companies are pretty concerned about advertising their ethical practices, on one side, in order to consolidate their involvement with collective demands of current societies and send a signal to the various stakeholders with whom they interact, and on the other, to differentiate their product offer and achieve competitive advantage in an increasingly globalized marketplace. In this sense, considering both lines together, customers maybe entail the most important group since they are the only ones to create income for companies. Based on this, this study analyses the importance of CSR for consumers in the food sector in reference to seven major CSR activities envisioned to fulfil seven stakeholders’ expectations considering three demographic variables of consumers. For that purpose, it is conducted a survey study with a total sample of 1,752 consumers and a multivariate analysis of variance to perform an intra-group comparison. In general, findings support a moderate impact of CSR over respondents, while some discrepancies can be observed between them within different age groups. Lastly, a final discussion is carried out gathering some interest considerations as direct reflection of results obtained and further lines of future research are indicated.