Lying by telling the truth – the risks of deception by paltering and hypocrisy in corporate social responsibilities context

This research investigated how fashion corporations’ paltering-based deceptive marketing, specifically related to corporate social responsibility (CSR), might influence consumers. Specifically, it investigated if it evokes hypocrisy perceptions to influence consumers’ purchase decisions and how the mediating roles of consumer-corporation-relationship and consumer-based corporate-reputation can explain such influences. Using a two-factor online experiment (paltering x message replications), data were collected from 252 US consumers. PROCESS results indicated that CSR-paltering positively evoked hypocrisy and, in turn, dampened consumer-corporation-relationship and corporate-reputation. Such hypocrisy significantly reduced purchase-intentions, but only when mediated through consumer-corporation-relationship. No significant negative relationships between deception and purchase-intentions were observed when mediated by hypocrisy alone or combined with corporate-reputation. Additionally, paltering directly influenced relational and reputational evaluations. The novelty of this research lies in its focus on paltering-based deception, prevalent within the fashion industry, and how technically true yet misleading CSR marketing influences consumers. This study also responds to the urgent scholarly calls for investigating deception’s role in consumers’ hypocrisy and adds how this new type of deception is also an attributing factor. Further, it provides corporations insight into how CSR paltering, despite its technically true information, can damage consumers’ relational and reputational attachments and their behavioral intentions if discovered.