Does Information Source Matter? Corporate Reputation Management during Negative Social Responsibility Events

Abstract

In the era of digital marketing, where consumers and enterprises frequently interact with each other, consumers hold different attitudes toward the different sources of information, including corporate social responsibility information. Negative corporate social responsibility can have direct impacts on corporate reputation. Choosing appropriate channels to publish the negative social responsibility information of enterprises in order to reduce the impact of these negative social events on corporate reputation is imperative for corporate image management. This research examines the differences in the impact of enterprise-generated content and -co-generated content on consumer attitudes using second-hand data analysis and then investigates how different information sources influence corporate reputation through empirical experiments. The results indicate that co-generated content performs better than other sources of information on corporate reputation, while professional user-generated content has the most negative impact. We further identify the external attribution as a mediation mechanism in the relationship between information sources and corporate reputation. The theoretical contributions and managerial implications of the research findings are discussed.

Keywords

• corporate social responsibility (CSR)
• information sources
• attribution of responsibility
• corporate reputation