The Impact of Corporate Social Responsibility on Brand Personality: The Mediating Role of Consumer Emotional Intelligence – An Analytical Study of a Sample of Apple Product Users

Abstract

This study aims to explore the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on building brand personality, with a particular focus on the mediating role of consumer emotional intelligence. The research is grounded in the assumption that a brand’s commitment to the key dimensions of CSR—ethical, economic, social, and environmental—can directly contribute to shaping the five dimensions of brand personality: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness. Furthermore, the study posits that consumer emotional intelligence, represented by its four dimensions—self-emotional appraisal, others’ emotional appraisal, emotion regulation, and emotion utilization—acts as a mediating factor that enhances this relationship by enabling consumers to understand and manage their emotions toward the brand and build stronger emotional bonds with it. A quantitative methodology was adopted using online questionnaires distributed to a sample of university students from the College of Administration and Economics who are Apple iPhone users, with a total of 83 valid responses. Data were analyzed using statistical modeling. The findings indicate that CSR significantly contributes to the development of brand personality, and that consumer emotional intelligence functions as an effective mediating mechanism that strengthens this effect, thereby fostering consumer loyalty and enhancing the brand’s competitive advantage in the market.