Corporate social responsibility: the effect of need-for-status and fluency on consumers’ attitudes

The purpose of this study is to understand the joint effects of individuals’ need for status and processing fluency on customer attitudes toward hotels’ participation in corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.

This study uses a 2 (Need for status: high vs low) × 2 (Processing fluency: high vs low) experimental design with processing fluency being manipulated and individuals’ need for status being measured.

The results indicate that although high-need for status customers exhibit a more positive attitude than low-need for status customers when the CSR message is easy to process, they show similar attitude levels when processing fluency is relatively low.

This study makes great contribution to the literature of status consumption by examining CSR as one of the new areas that consumers use to signal social status beyond luxury products. For practitioners, the results of this study offer suggestions on how to design CSR messages to increase its effectiveness.