A Systematic Review of Management as Well as Marketing Perspective of CSR: Future Research Agenda

Abstract

The reason why CSR as an area has been chosen in this systematic review is because CSR as a concept in the past decade has evolved as an emergent and an important construct in the academic literature and the business field. There are two categories in which the systematic review of literature in the context of CSR can be done; management as well as marketing perspective. The focus in this study is on the management (CSR and firm performance) as well as the marketing perspective (particularly the consumers at an individual level as to how do they perceive the CSR activities by the corporations). The reason why consumers are chosen is because there are many studies which have focused on the stakeholders’ perspective towards CSR but also as per the research, consumers being one of the most important and relevant stakeholders of all time are kind of neglected to a certain extent. The FMCG sector is one of the sectors of the economy to which consumers are directly linked. The purpose is to analyse the relevant studies related to these two separately and comment on the merging of these two concepts as there is a lot of research that is needed when it comes to understanding both these perspectives and finding the other major gaps in research already conducted. The motive is to focus on the sequence and review the studies starting with CSR as a concept, drivers of CSR, mandatory role of CSR as per section 135 of the Companies’ Act, 2013, management perspective of CSR, marketing perspective of CSR by studying consumer perception in general and ultimately arriving the consumer perception towards CSR in the FMCG sector which will be helpful for the academicians and the practitioners in the long run. The major research gaps that could be found or it can be said that future research agenda could be that in case of management perspective, the focus was mainly on the profitability measures of analysing the firm performance. The solution to this could be to consider other measures as well including accounting and the market-based measures. While going through the literature in the context of consumer perception in general and also in the FMCG sector, the major gaps that should be addressed are that the focus has mainly been on the external aspect of the consumers including the purchasing or buying behaviour and assessing the consumer knowledge and awareness about the products and services. The future researchers should try to focus upon the internal aspect of the consumers including consumers’ attitudes, trust and the beliefs. The merging of the management and the marketing perspective can be done by taking consumer related variables as the mediating variables so that the direct or indirect effect of these variables can be analysed on the overall performance of the corporations.