Are corporate social responsibility and advertising complements or substitutes in producing firm reputation?

Abstract

A firm’s reputation is one of the critical drivers of success, and two of the key levers firms use to influence their perceived reputation are corporate social responsibility (CSR) and advertising. The relationship between CSR and advertising is important because whether they are complements or substitutes has different implications for how firms use these activities. Using a unique panel dataset of US-listed companies between 2005 and 2014, we estimate flexible production functions to identify whether CSR and advertising act as complements or substitutes in the production of firm reputation. A secondary motivation of this paper is to examine whether the use of different stakeholder ratings of firm reputation matters. We find evidence consistent with advertising and CSR being substitutes toward the production of firm reputation. Our results also show that advertising, own-firm CSR activities, and industry-level CSR spillovers contribute positively to firm reputation. Lastly, we find that the effects of CSR and advertising vary across the stakeholder groups (general public, business executives, or CSR experts) used in the analysis.