Methodological provisions for conducting empirical research of the availability and implementation of the consumers socially responsible intentions

TL;DR

This paper develops methodological guidelines for empirical research on consumers' social responsibility, highlighting the gap between their socially responsible intentions and actual behavior, based on a survey in Kharkiv.

Contribution

It introduces new methodological provisions for assessing the discrepancy between consumer intentions and actions regarding social responsibility.

Findings

High willingness among consumers to support socially responsible enterprises

Significant gap between intentions and actions due to lack of awareness

Empirical survey confirms the effectiveness of the proposed methodology

Abstract

Social responsibility of consumers is one of the main conditions for the recoupment of enterprises expenses associated with the implementation of social and ethical marketing tasks. Therefore, the enterprises, which plan to act on terms of social and ethical marketing, should monitor the social responsibility of consumers in the relevant markets. At the same time, special attention should be paid to the analysis of factors that prevent consumers from implementing their socially responsible intentions in the regions with a low level of social activity of consumers. The purpose of the article is to develop methodological guidelines that determine the tasks and directions of conducting empirical studies aimed at assessing the gap between the socially responsible intentions of consumers and the actual implementation of these intentions, as well as to identify the causes of this gap. An empirical survey of the sampled consumers in Kharkiv was carried out in terms of the proposed methodological provisions. It revealed a rather high level of respondents' willingness to support socially responsible enterprises and a rather low level of implementation of these intentions due to the lack of consumers awareness. To test the proposed methodological guidelines, an empirical study of the consumers social responsibility was conducted in 2017 on a sample of students and professors of the Semen Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics (120 people). Questioning of the respondents was carried out using the Google Forms. The finding allowed to make conclusion for existence of a high level of respondents' willingness to support socially responsible and socially active enterprises. However, the study also revealed the existence of a significant gap between the intentions and actions of consumers, caused by the lack of awareness.