‘‘I Need You Too!’’ Corporate Identity Attractiveness for Consumers and The Role of Social Responsibility Longinos Marin Salvador Ruiz ABSTRACT. The extent to which people identify with an organization is dependent on the attractiveness of the organizational identity, which helps individuals satisfy one or more important self-definitional needs. However, little is known about the antecedents of company identity attractiveness (IA) in a consumer–company context. Drawing on theories of social identity and organizational identification, a model of the antecedents of IA is developed and tested. The findings provide empirical validation of the relationship between IA and corporate associations perceived by consumers. Our results dem- onstrate that the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) contribution to company IA is much stronger than that of Corporate Ability (CA). This may be linked to increasing competition and of decreasing CA-based variation in the marketplace. KEY WORDS: consumer behavior, corporate social responsibility, identification, identity attractiveness, rela- tionship marketing Introduction While the customer-oriented literature on company relationships has been growing (de Wulf et al., 2001; Sheth and Parvatiyar, 1995), the consumerÕs view of these relationships remains unexplored (Barnes, 1997). The effective management of customer rela- tionships requires a previous consideration of why customers enter into relationships with firms. While from the firmÕs perspective it is fairly clear that engaging in a positive relationship with its customers would enhance their loyalty and retention, leading to greater company profitability (Reichheld, 1993; Stephens et al., 1996), customersÕ motivation to engage in a relationship with companies is not always apparent. Companies, as organizations, con- stitute a social group (Dutton et al., 1994) and recent literature has found that one component of cus- tomersÕ motivation to engage in relationships with companies is to help companies provide to con- sumers in order to satisfy one or more key self- definitional needs through identification (Ahearne et al., 2005; Bhattacharya and Sen, 2003). Originally developed in the areas of social psy- chology and organizational behavior, the concept of identification satisfies the need for social identity and self-definition, and in turn, has been demonstrated to positively impact member loyalty (Mael and Ashforth, 1992) as well as employeesÕ citizenship behaviors (Bergami and Bagozzi, 2000). Through organizational identification, organizations contrib- ute to individualsÕ social identity (Brewer, 1991; Dutton et al., 1994), i.e., the internalization of a group category as part of the self-concept and the acceptance of the values and behavioral norms of the collectivity. Researchers and theorists have shown that the extent to which people identify with an organization is dependent on the attractiveness of the organiza- tional identity (Dutton et al., 1994). Identity attractiveness (IA) in the consumer–company con- text is likely to be a necessary condition for identi- fication (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2003). Nonetheless, despite the relevance of consumer–company iden- tification in the marketplace, little is known about the antecedents of company IA for consumers. Furthermore, researchers (Maignan and Ferrell, 2004; Sen and Bhattacharya 2001) have suggested that organizational identification theory may provide a solid basis for understanding how positive corpo- rate social responsibility (CSR) generates the active Journal of Business Ethics (2007) 71:245–260 Ó Springer 2006 DOI 10.1007/s10551-006-9137-y