The involvement in Corporate Social Responsibility activities can have relevant impacts on a company’s reputation. Since the CSR strategy implementation usually requires an organisation to invest a great amount of money, we wonder if this activity is genuine or if it is just a marketing tool used by the companies to enhance their reputation and to sell more.
The truth is that CSR is not just a ‘good-will’ practice but an important tool for a company to succeed (Luo and Bhattacharya 2009). However, engaging in CSR is not enough for a firm to attract consumers. The organisation has to keep in mind what the consumers think about their CSR policy
THEIR PERCEIVED AUTHENTICITY
authenticity. People are able to analyse, judge and misbelieve in the initiatives of a company. The result is the confinement of a company in one of the two following categories: carrying out substantive CSR (the genuine one) or carrying out symbolic CSR (the one that only serves the company’s purposes) (Carlson 2016). What do the consumers look at when making this judgement though? They evaluate the level of authenticity by looking at the actions taken by the company itself and at the existent issue. If the actions taken by the company are perceived to be effective in order to solve the problem, then the interest of the company is perceived to be authentic (Alouthi et al. 2016).