Comparison of the impact of a retailer's CSR actions on its relationship with its clients [Comparaison de l’impact de différentes actions RSE d’une enseigne sur sa relation avec ses consommateurs]

This research investigates the respective contributions of three CSR actions (sponsorship, cause-related marketing, CSR-linked sponsorship), implemented by a retailer, to the development and maintenance of a relationship between this retailer and its consumers in order to build loyalty. 364 individuals who were members of an internal panel were assigned to one of these three CSR actions. The results obtained indicate that these three CSR actions increase or maintain consumers' loyalty to a retailer through its personality, its perceived identity proximity and their trust in this retailer, but that the type of CSR actions considered has an influence on the validated causal relationships. From a theoretical point of view, this research complements previous works which have mainly focused on the effectiveness of the means of communication used in order to highlight these three CSR actions in terms of persuasion and attitude towards the brand using them (Lii and Lee, 2012; Lii et al., 2013; Uhrich et al., 2014; Floter et al., 2016). In fact, these works never compared them as loyalty tools. From a managerial point of view, it indicates a classification of these CSR actions to be favored according to their weight on the variables studied (personality, identity proximity, trust and loyalty) and their impacts on them: 1) CSR- linked sponsorship; 2) sponsorship and 3) cause-related marketing. Lastly, this research stresses that sponsorship and cause-related marketing are complementary and that these actions must therefore be linked together.