Hold me responsible: The role of corporate social responsibility and corporate reputation for client-perceived value

Corporate communication practices are becoming ever more important for business service clients, as they signal quality and hence are related to client-perceived value. The purpose of this paper is to examine the interplay between corporate social responsibility (CSR), corporate reputation and client-perceived value, and to assess the moderating role of strategic orientation in business service relationships.

The conceptual framework based on the corporate communication framework, signaling theory and relationship marketing theory has been tested on a survey sample of 228 client firms, using covariance-based SEM and additional procedures for assessment of mediation and moderated mediation.

This paper reveals that communication practices concerning CSR positively and significantly influence client-perceived value. The authors show that reputation fully mediates the effect of CSR on client-perceived value. Finally, the effect of CSR on value is stronger if the client firm has a short-term strategic orientation, while long-term strategic orientation boosts the effect of corporate reputation on customer-perceived value.

Further research on the topic may involve developing links between other elements of the corporate communication framework and client-perceived value.

The originality of the paper lies in better understanding the effects of CSR and corporate reputation on client-perceived value. The authors provide empirical evidence of the mediating role of reputation between the CSR (seen as “actions”) and client-perceived value.