Corporate social responsibility and the positioning of grocery brands An exploratory study of retailer and manufacturer brands at point of purchase

Purpose - This study aims to enhance the understanding of what significance consumers place on different aspects of corporate social responsibility (CSR) when evaluating and purchasing grocery brands and products. Design/methodology/approach - The paper builds on existing literature and theories on CSR and marketing, as well as literature on consumers' perceptions of CSR related issues. The Swedish empirical study has two parts; the first explorative stage based on qualitative method and in-store face-to-face interviews through which important consumer attitude-based attributes of social responsibility are identified in a grocery context. The second quantitative part is based on questionnaires that describe the grocery brand positions and performances along these attributes. Findings - Results point to three general attitude-based dimensions for CSR positioning and that retail brands can indeed, in relation to leading national brands, build a CSR image. Further, this image is shown to have an impact on consumers' intention to buy. This is also the case for me-too retail brands. The CSR dimension of greatest impact on overall CSR image is product responsibility, whereas human responsibility influences the customer purchase intentions the most. Environmental responsibility, perhaps the most commonly used CSR dimension, is in this study recognised to exert least impact on both overall CSR image and on purchase intentions. Research limitations/implications - This study is limited to a Swedish context and to one specific purchase situation. Future studies could involve validation of factor structure, relationship between CSR and preference, and ability to positioning in another market, perhaps in more mature markets in terms of well-developed structures of CSR and health/organic organic products (e.g. the UK). A postal survey would allow the use of longer and evaluated measurement scales previously used in organic food research. Originality/value - This study substantiates that retailer brands can indeed be distinctly positioned according to aspects other than price, e.g. as here exemplified, the concept of CSR. This relationship has hitherto not been identified outside the UK. The finding that CSR is less clearly connected to the expected dimension of environmental responsibility entails new added knowledge to this research field. The analysis has, moreover, resulted in more a simplified description of the basic dimensions of CSR containing three instead of, as often in the literature, six dimensions.