This research has been conducted to investigate the effect of a company creating shared value influencing consumers’ emotions that lead to prosocial behavior. Although there has been research on consumers’ emotional factors in relation to corporate social responsibility (Soscia, 2007), but there has not been much research on consumers’ prosocial behavior in relation to companies creating shared value. The resulting structural equation model reveals some relation between creating shared value and consumer’s emotional factors, namely gratitude and pride. According to Porter & Kramer (2011), creating shared value can be taken as creating both social value and economic value, and this can influence consumer’s emotional aspects.
As a result, the economic value of a company creating shared value had a positive relation to consumer gratitude and pride. However, the social value of a company creating shared value had a positive relation to consumer gratitude, but not pride. This could be because the social value of creating shared value caused hubristic pride in consumers. Therefore, for companies creating shared value to approach consumer pride on a social value level, a differentiated approach is proposed.
Also, upon inspection of the moderating effect of a company’s authenticity on a consumer’s gratitude and pride, except for the hypothesis where a company’s shared value did not have much social value causation on the consumer’s emotions, the other hypotheses resulted in showing a positive moderating effect. Therefore, a company’s authenticity is important in getting the consumers evaluate its actions emotionally.
The results of this research has shown that consumer gratitude has a positive relation to prosocial behavior. This is consistent with the research on corporate social responsibility having a positive relation with consumer gratitude and prosocial behavior (Kwak & Kwon, 2016). Also, consumer pride was expressed in prosocial behavior, and this is consistent with Wubben et al (2012). These results can possibly explain why consumers donate and engage in prosocial activities. Also, it has been shown that consumer’s prosocial behavior is related to positive emotions (Liu & Aaker, 2008; Dunn et al., 2000). As shown in the results above, companies creating shared value influence consumer’s emotions and a company’s authenticity acts as the moderating effect.