Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility and Transformational Leadership on Brand Community

Not much work has been done to study the impact of various organizational variables on brand communities around various brands and consequently we have limited knowledge on how to build brand communities. Strong brand communities can be of tremendous value to organizations by generating increased customer loyalty towards their brands. This study attempts to examine the impact of corporate social responsibility and transformational leadership on brand community. The study employed a scenario based 2 × 2 experimental design, with corporate social responsibility and transformational leadership as the manipulated variables. The sample consisted of 118 graduate students doing the first year of their MBA programme in a leading management institute in India. Due to lack of availability of any standard measure, an instrument was developed to measure brand communities. Results of 2 × 2 factored analysis of variance show that brand community is enhanced by both corporate social responsibility and transformational leadership. The implications of these findings for firms and their top management are discussed.