Does corporate social responsibility protect companies from a crisis? - empirical findings

Today, many companies communicate their activities in Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) to consumers. While advertising their CSR activities they hope to increase their companies’ image as well as the purchase intention and willingness to pay their products by the consumer. Companies doing so, send signals as “good company” to their consumers. Following signalling theory they have different types in communicating CSR, which will be experimentally compared in diverse settings and sequences. Moreover companies hope to build up a “good company” buffer for a potential company crisis while communication CSR. However, what happens, if journalists or social organisations look behind the companies’ activities and see that companies don’t behave like they have communicated. Is such a CSR communication buffer strong enough to protect the company’s image from a crisis? Or will such circumstances lead to a backfire effect because consumers are already more sensitive to the company’s responsibility? In different experimental settings this question will be answered by comparing various types of signals, that companies send to consumers.