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Introduction
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been posited to lead to mutually beneficial long-term and trustworthy relationships with stakeholders (Mobin et al., 2016). Because customers are major stakeholders of an organization (Freeman, 1984), it is not surprising that studying CSR from customers’ viewpoint and understanding the process(es) by which they affect customer loyalty has increasingly attracted the interest of researchers and practitioners, particularly in the service sector (Arendt and Brettel, 2010; Jensen et al., 2018).
Although in academia researchers have come to realize that the relationship between CSR and customer loyalty is not, as initially perceived, a direct one (Sen and Battacharya, 2001; Lai et al., 2010; Pérez and Rodríguez del Bosque, 2015), they have not yet reached a concrete conclusion either about the process by which this effect occurs (Deng and Xu, 2017) or about the impact of specific dimensions of CSR on these variables. The studies that have recognized the complex nature of the relationship between CSR and customer loyalty borrowed ideas mainly from the theoretical grounds of social exchange theory (Blau, 1964) and suggested that social exchange variables may intervene in this relationship. Along these lines, trust was recognized as the main mediating variable that reinforces the development of customer loyalty (Stanaland et al., 2011). Furthermore, another stream of researchers affected by the self-categorization (Tajfel and Turner, 1979) and social identity theories assumed customer–company identification (C–C identification; Bhattacharya and Sen, 2003) as a mediator (Lichtenstein et al., 2004; Deng and Xu, 2017). However, Martinez and Rodríguez del Bosque (2013) adopted an integrated approach by incorporating both customer trust and C–C identification as mediators, expecting (based on Bhattacharya and Sen’s theoretical work, 2003) also a positive impact of customer trust on C–C identification; this hypothesis, however, did not receive empirical support. Regarding the relationship between customer trust and C–C identification, it is noteworthy that relevant research is both limited and inconclusive about the direction of the influence (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2003; Rodríguez del Bosque, 2013).
Based on the previous discussion, it is understood that a multi-theoretical approach is needed to develop a comprehensive model of CSR and customer loyalty to provide a better understanding of the potential impact of CSR on customers. Accordingly, in the present paper, social...