The short and long-run impact of empowering customers in corporate social responsibility initiatives

Rather than just informing customers about their corporate social responsibility initiatives, many for-profit firms have sought to engage their customers in these activities. Previous research assessing the impact of these programs has focused on short-run effects on customer behavior, typically documenting positive effects. We report the results of a quasi-experiment, in which customers either received information about a firm's charitable campaign or were given that information and the opportunity to vote for the charitable recipient. Our results demonstrate that the long-run effect is the reverse of the short-run effect. In the short term, inviting customers to vote (vs. information only) increases the average size of customers’ shopping baskets. However, in the long-run the effects are reversed; merely providing information (rather than inviting customers to vote) has a more positive long-term impact on customer purchasing. The long-run effects are much larger than the short-run effects, such that focusing solely on the short-run outcome would result in decisions that lower overall profits. These results have important managerial implications for firms seeking to engage customers in their charitable giving initiatives.