Consumers’ Perception towards Corporate Social Responsibility: An Empirical Study in North Odisha

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is viewed as a comprehensive set of policies, practices and programmes that are integrated into business operations, supply chains and decision-making processes throughout the organisation, wherever the organisation does business and includes responsibility for current and past actions as well as future impacts. In the last 20 years, there has been a sea of change in the nature of the triangular relationship between companies, the state and the society. Firms can no longer continue to act as independent entities regardless of the interest of the general public. The evolution of the relationship between companies and the society has been one of slow transformation from a hard-core business to a philanthropic one. In the light of this background, the objective of this paper was to analyse consumers’ expectations and perceptions towards CSR and to find the significant factors that influence consumer perceptions. This paper has also tried to find out the gap between the expectations and perceptions of the consumers about the companies regarding their social responsibility and also helps companies in understanding the expectations of consumers about CSR, so that companies can fulfil their duty in an appropriate manner. Our research suggests that consumers may well make inferences about company CSR performance on the basis of very limited information. This has implications for company CSR strategy and for public policy in which companies attempt to use the CSR halo to manipulate consumer perceptions of CSR performance.