Social Responsibility in Digital Context and Consumer Behavior: The Case of Kuwait

For a great number of years now, corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been an important topic in businesses research, its potential impact on a company's reputation, brand, customer satisfaction, corporate performance and sustainability. Successful companies need to be socially responsible to acquire competitive advantage for their business. In this way, they may strengthen their brand, improve their reputation and credibility via-a-vis customers, suppliers etc. The COVID-19 pandemic and its implications forced companies to adopt social responsibility initiatives by online and digital platforms. This in turn, led to interesting implications for the entire concept of CSR. This digitally enhanced dimension of CSR shall be referred to in this paper as digital social responsibility (DSR). In this context the objective of this paper is to examine the impact of DSR on: Brand Image (BI), Spending Habits (SH), Product Involvement (PI), and Technology Adoption (TA) on consumers’ purchasing behavior (CPB) through the mediating role of digital marketing. By focusing on the case of Kuwait, a descriptive analysis approach, supported by online survey (convenience sampling) was employed to examine the issue. The analysis suggests that BI, SH and TA significantly impacted CPB, but PI did not have an impact on CPB. It was found that DSR variables have significantly impacted CPB through using DM as mediating variable.