An investigation on the effect of advertising corporate social responsibility on building corporate reputation and brand equity

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) plays an important role on creating a good image for business owners especially in banking industry. In this paper, we present an empirical survey to measure the impact of CSR on increasing reputation as well as creating brand equity through customer satisfaction. There are five hypotheses in our survey where we examine whether positive perception on bank’s customers on CSR activities influences customer satisfaction, brand equity and firm’s reputation. In addition, we examine whether customer satisfaction, as in intermediate variable, influences the relationship between CSR and bank’s reputation as well as CSR and firm’s brand equity. The proposed study of this paper designs a questionnaire and distributes it among 384 experts who work for an Iranian bank located in city of Tehran, Iran. According to our results, there is a positive impact of CSR on customer satisfaction (B=0.84). In addition, there is a positive relationship between customer satisfaction and firm reputation (B=0.70), and between customer satisfaction and brand equity (B=0.98). However, our survey did not confirm that CSR had any positive impact on corporate reputation or brand equity.