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1. Introduction
After the latest global crisis of 2007-2008, companies seemed to experience a loss of credibility with capital and consumer markets in terms of their effectiveness. Thus, managers in most industries face the challenge of improving their companies' image and regaining trust by developing attractive organizational identities (Pérez and Rodríguez del Bosque, 2014). For this purpose, companies have recently focused on corporate social responsibility (CSR) as a way of demonstrating their corporate ethicality and moral standards. CSR refers to context-specific corporate actions and policies that take into account stakeholder expectations and the triple bottom line of economic, social and environmental performance (Aguinis and Glavas, 2012).
As a consequence of this increase in CSR awareness, scholars have started to explore the pros and cons of CSR investment for companies. Interestingly, scholars have revealed an increased interest in the topic over time, with an influx in the number of papers published since the 1970s (Lev et al. , 2010; Aguinis and Glavas, 2012). Specifically, previous research has demonstrated that the benefits of CSR include improvement in employee motivation and commitment, the generation of competitive advantage, better reputation and an improved brand image (Luo and Bhattacharya, 2006).
Despite this however, the study of the consequences of CSR in relation to customer affection and behaviour has yielded inconclusive results so far (Walsh and Bartikowski, 2013). Within this marketing research line, scholars are especially interested in understanding how customers perceive companies' CSR orientations and their response to perceptions in terms of relevant marketing variables including identification with the company, satisfaction and loyalty (Aguinis and Glavas, 2012). In this regard, while some scholars perceive that customers' CSR perceptions have positive effects on customer identification with the company, satisfaction and repurchase intentions (Du et al. , 2007; García de los Salmones et al. , 2005; Pérez et al. , 2013a; Sen and Bhattacharya, 2001), other studies fail to find such effects (Auger et al. , 2008; Berens et al. , 2007). For example, Auger et al. (2008) observes that customers not among the most socially conscious segments are unwilling to sacrifice functionality for social desirability. In this study, they demonstrate how purchase intentions decrease massively when customers perceive negative functional attributes, even when the CSR attributes are well perceived. Furthermore,...