Productive partnerships? Driving consumer awareness to action in CSR partnerships

Despite proliferated growth in corporate social responsibility partnerships (CSRPs), there is limited understanding of how consumer groups native to an organization respond to partnership organizations (direct patrons). To redress this, an integrated theoretical framework incorporating consumer behavior, branding and CSR literature was developed focusing on drivers of consumer awareness leading to subsequent responses in a sports team and not-for-profit organization (NPO) partnership context. Systematic comparisons were also made by adopting the perspective of each native consumer group. The proposed conceptual model was tested with data obtained from sports team fans (n = 504) and NPO patrons (n = 355). Results indicate that consumer attributes and engagement with communication channels activate CSRP awareness, although website visitation does not and in line with associative network theory, each consumer group generally go through an awareness-to-action process. Multi-group results demonstrate a stronger intent to act among NPO patrons than fans, indicative of fans’ lower prioritization of CSRPs.