The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Religious Consumers’ Luxury Consumption

Our research explores whether the luxury industry engaging corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives provides religious consumers a sense of meaningfulness in their luxury consumption, leading to positive word-of-mouth (WOM). By differentiating intrinsic religiosity from extrinsic religiosity, another goal of our research is to see whether religious orientation moderates the mediating role of a sense of meaningfulness. Our three experiments jointly suggest that engaging CSR (vs. control) increases religious consumers’ sense of meaningfulness in their luxury consumption. This is important because a sense of meaningfulness mediates the impact of CSR on religious consumers’ positive WOM. Our results further suggest that the mediating role of meaningfulness is moderated by religious orientation, more evident when intrinsic religiosity is higher. We also empirically rule out perceived hedonism and negative moral emotions as alternative explanations. These results have important theoretical implications for the literature on the incompatibility between CSR and luxury, religiosity and luxury consumption as well as existing CSR literature.