Abstract: The significance of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is widely recognized, but it is also considered that initiatives on CSR have little effect in practice or do not actually help to solve social problems. After thorough academic discussions, the concept of Creating Shared Value (CSV) was proposed and considered as a corporate solution to achieving shared prosperity. However, its feasibility depends on whether the shared value proposition (SVP) can positively influence consumers, which is vital for the success of the corresponding CSV strategic behavior. However, so far, most of the research in this area has remained at the deduction stage, lacking convincing empirical support. Even though there are sporadic studies focusing on the impact of SVP on consumer behavior, these studies treat consumers simply as the rational man, ignoring the fact that consumers are essentially affective creatures.
Aiming to fill these research gaps, this study focuses on the impact of SVP on consumer brand engagement. On the one hand, with reference to SDL ecosystem theory, this study considers SVP as a corporate strategy to win the support of consumers in the digital era and promote their participation in value co-creation; on the other hand, this study considers SVP as marketing stimuli that influence consumers and lead to their positive responses. This study treats consumers as the complete man, who have both rationality and affection. Hence, the study introduces the Cognitive-Affective Personality System (CAPS) theory to deconstruct the mechanism by which SVP influences consumers’ brand engagement. This study draws on the CAPS theory, proposing a model with two parallel mediating variables to explicate the inner mechanism of how SVP works to influence consumers, aiming to verify the effectiveness of CSV. Those two variables are consumer’s expectation of the effectiveness of creating shared value and consumer’s psychological ownership.
The study proposes that consumer’s expectation of the effectiveness of CSV is the result of the interaction between SVP and CAPS rational units, while psychological ownership is the result of the interaction between SVP and CAPS perceptual units. Both of them interact with each other to have an impact on consumers’ response. Under such a basic assumption, the study chooses 33 Chinese brands with SVP as the research objects to test the influence of these brand names on consumers. These brands fall into three categories: one is called the Internet Entertainment, which means redefining consumer entertainment needs with Internet thinking and achieving value creation by creating free public products and value-added services for a fee; another is called the Sustainable Value, which considers sustainable development as productivity rather than cost and creates shareable sustainable value; and still another is called the Digital Innovation, which refers to transforming the traditional industrial chain through digital technology, achieving digital cluster development, and improving the social production, living and consumption efficiency. The study adopts the mixed-subjects sampling method, in which the three types of brands are mixed as one research object, and 827 samples made up mostly by Digital Native are taken by the convenience sampling method.
This study develops a measurement scale for consumer’s expectation of the effectiveness of shared value and conducts regression analyses based on the research data obtained from the above sampling. The results of the analyses confirm the veracity of the SVP for both of these paths, i.e., the SVP has an impact on consumer brand engagement perfectly mediated by the cold cognitive unit,i.e. effectiveness expectation of shared value, and the warm unit,i.e. psychological ownership. The study reveals that SVP characterized by “benefiting others” also has the effect of “realizing one’s value” by promoting consumers’ brand engagement. Besides, the study extends our research on consumer brand engagement behavior in the digital age, further explaining the psychological mechanism behind consumer brand engaging behavior.

Key words: shared value proposition, effectiveness expectation of shared value, psychological ownership, consumer brand engagement, engagement marketing

摘要： 随着各种社会问题的不断出现,企业社会责任研究进入新阶段,而创造共享价值战略被寄予厚望,但是否可行要取决于共享价值主张能否对消费者产生积极影响。以关于个性的“认知——情感”系统理论为基础,构建起双中介模型来阐释共享价值主张推动消费者品牌契合意向的内在机制,可为创造共享价值的有效性提供证据。采用混合物受试法,以中国情境33个共享品牌为研究对象,抽取了827个互联网原住民为主体的研究样本,实证研究显示,共享价值主张将触发消费者“认知——情感系统”并通过“冷”认知路径和“热”情感路径共同推动品牌契合意向。其中,作为认知路径的共享价值效能预期和作为情感路径的心理所有权均为完全中介变量。研究确认了“惠人”的共享价值主张通过推动消费者品牌契合的方式实现“达己”的效果逻辑。

关键词: SVP, 共享价值效能预期, 心理所有权, 品牌契合, 契合营销