Over the recent years, many foreign researchers have been exploring the strategic meaning of corporate social responsibility (CSR). CSR has been closely related with such key words as strategy, customer buying behavior, brand, and profitability. In China, corporations are still far from fully aware of the potential influence of CSR, and thus they are not active to assume CSR. Western theories and practices both demonstrate that assuming CSR not only is favorable for enhancing the entire social welfare, but also helps the companies themselves a lot in their own development. To encourage corporations in China to take on CSR more actively, in addition to making companies aware of the great impact of CSR on companies, exploring the link between CSR and customer satisfaction (CS) will be a good breakthrough point, for customer satisfaction, in marketing practice, is of strategic importance, and also has profound influence on the longterm profit and shareholder value. Therefore, research on the link between CSR and CS will lead corporations to improve their competitiveness with the appropriate CSR practice, and combine their own interests with the social welfare.
There have been mature research results in the fields concerning the concepts of CSR and CS, but empirical researches on the relationship between them are relatively few. Hence the basic thoughts, analysis tools and especially the index system in this thesis are on the basis of referring to the research results proposed in the current literature. Analysis of large amount of literature lays theoretical analysis foundation for the empirical research in this thesis, while the empirical research in return verifies the theoretic model and hypothesis. Based on literature analysis, this thesis establishes a theoretical model of CSR' s impact on CS. This model consists of five structure variables, which are CSR, corporate reputation, perception value, CS and customer loyalty, with the highlight of the three dimensions included in CSR.
Based on the demonstration in Shanghai milk industry as well as the customer evaluation and perception, this study explores the impact CSR puts on CS. According to 280 valid questionnaires from customers, by use of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and regression analysis, this study examines the model and hypothesis. According to empirical research, this study provides the following conclusions: in Shanghai milk industry, all the three dimensions, namely, the three different responsibilities that enterprises assume to community, environment and customer, can influence customers' general evaluation on CSR, but the importance of each varies; though CSR has no direct impact on the customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, it can put an obvious indirect impact on them remarkably through influencing enterprise reputation and customer perception value, so as to build a new passage for the link between CSR and CS.
