Dr. Shana Yong’s Paper

Abstract of Paper:

The level of awareness towards Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is quickly gaining ground in businesses throughout Malaysia. Instead of focusing on philanthropy, many companies are exploring ways to embed CSR into their products and services. However, limited empirical studies were found in this area. As such, this research was conducted on the effectiveness of social advertising and its mediation impact on trust beliefs in the Malaysian context. In addition, a comparison was done to determine whether CSR product initiative social advertising helps strengthen corporate reputation an whether it has any effect on consumers’ purchase intention as compared to non-CSR social advertising. Meanwhile, through the integration of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion theory, it was explained that the central route and peripheral route complements the extended S-O-R theory to clearly classify the affective and cognitive cues from social advertising stimuli and trust beliefs that affect the audiences’ minds. While eWoM credibility to trust beliefs is moderated by brand trust, informativeness to trust beliefs is moderated by brand familiarity in the theory of trust transfer. Interestingly, the findings demonstrated that only the central route of social advertising stimulus is significant to trust beliefs and trust beliefs are only mediated between the central route of social advertising and corporate reputation. Another contribution of this research is that the central route stimuli in the effectiveness of CSR product initiative social advertising was found to be positively influential for strengthening the relationship between trust beliefs and corporate reputation as well as corporate reputation and purchase intention when compared with non-CSR social advertising in Malaysia. An SEM research framework was developed and data were colleced through survey questionnaires from 653 respondents. Statistical analysis was conducted using SmartPLS and SPSS. The study has linked CSR product initiative to end users, adapated a model from a business-to-customer empirical study, and shed new lights for researchers, marketers and policy makers.