Consumers and Corporate Social Responsibility: Matching the Unmatchable?

Research addressing the relationships between corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and consumers-as-stakeholders' perceptions, attitudes and behaviours is dispersed over a range of topics, subsumed under different marketing concepts, and in general surprisingly under-researched given the centrality of CSR in both the normative management literature and public discourse. This paper gives an overview of the past two decades of research on consumers, marketing and CSR, taking the classical consumer decision-making model as frame of classification. The analysis reveals a significant methodology factor and a serious lack of knowledge concerning the consequences of strategic CSR activities.