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INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, adoption of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is striding forward in business environments, with more than 3,000 major companies in 116 countries joining the UN Global Compact (UNGCa, 2007), another 1,000 following the Global Reporting Initiative (UNGCb, 2007) guidelines and 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies with explicit CSR initiatives (Kotler and Lee, 2005). This growing CSR adoption is further helped by the fact that consumers are increasingly introducing social and environmental criteria in their consumption decisions. According to Market and Opinion Research International (MORI, 2004), 38 percent of European consumers consider that a company's social commitment is important when it comes to deciding whether to buy their products or services, and 46 percent consider it to be quite important. This explains why CSR is a highly efficient corporate positioning strategy and has become an attribute for competitive differentiation (Drumwright, 1996; Du et al. , 2007), triggering the increasing development of promotional strategies that aim to generate the perception of a socially responsible company through association with social causes. These strategies have been variously called cause-related marketing (CrM; Varadarajan and Menon, 1988; Webb and Mohr, 1998), social cause sponsorships (Cornwell and Coote, 2005; Kotler and Lee, 2005) or cause-brand alliances (CBAs; Lafferty and Goldsmith, 2005).
In that context, it is logical that a specific research stream, which focuses on the influence of CSR information on consumer behaviour has emerged (Du et al. , 2007). However, results are not conclusive; although some researchers have shown that information on social responsibility has a positive influence on consumer behaviour (Brown and Dacin, 1997; Creyer and Ross, 1997), others have shown that CSR is not so relevant for consumer's decisions (Carrigan and Attalla, 2001; Uusitalo and Oksanen, 2004).
In this line, one of the most innovative proposals is to consider that responses to CSR initiatives depend on the degree of identification with the consumer that the company generates through its social responsibility messages (Lichtenstein et al. , 2004; Marín and Ruiz, 2007; Sen and Bhattacharya, 2001). Consumer's identification with the company (C-C identification) is an intense, significant psychological link, which perfectly aligns consumer behaviour with the organisation's objectives (Du et al. , 2007). Analysis of C-C identification can be used to provide a more effective explanation for...