How Young Consumers Perceive Firms’ Environment, Social, and Governance (ESG)
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Demand for ESG is surging. However, not many are known regarding how consumers perceive firms’ ESG. To fill this gap in the literature, the current research seeks to explore how firms’ ESG is perceived by the young generation as well as to explore how the young generation perceive South Korean firms from the ethical perspective. For this purpose, we surveyed ninety-two respondents (35.8% male; Mage=23.5) and they completed the survey. In the survey, respondents indicated their perception regarding South Korean firms’ ethical business management and South Korean firms’ ESG management. Most respondents said ESG would be important (88%) and helpful to achieve competitive advantage (81.5%). However, interestingly, almost of respondents (46.7%) said that ESG would be helpful to maximize productivity. Rather, 92.4% of respondents perceived that ESG would be helpful to enhance firms’ images. In addition, they also perceived that the importance of ESG would become great in the future (85.9%) enough to make a significantly positive impact on firms’ productivity (72.8%). In addition to these findings about ESG, we further investigated how this young generation perceived the ethical business climate among South Korean companies. The results show that only 17.3% of respondents said South Korean business is ethical and 70.6% thought ethical problems would be a problem in the future. While the investigation for South Korean consumers’ perception of ESG and ethical business is not many, our work makes a significant theoretical contribution by providing empirical evidence on this issue. Our results are also managerially meaningful by being a reference to South Korean companies as well as global companies who are interested in the Korean market.
Abstract
Demand for ESG is surging. However, not many are known regarding how consumers perceive firms’ ESG. To fill this gap in the literature, the current research seeks to explore how firms’ ESG is perceived by the young generation as well as to explore how the young generation perceive South Korean firms from the ethical perspective. For this purpose, we surveyed ninety-two respondents (35.8% male; Mage=23.5) and they completed the survey. In the survey, respondents indicated their perception regarding South Korean firms’ ethical business management and South Korean firms’ ESG management. Most respondents said ESG would be important (88%) and helpful to achieve competitive advantage (81.5%). However, interestingly, almost of respondents (46.7%) said that ESG would be helpful to maximize productivity. Rather, 92.4% of respondents perceived that ESG would be helpful to enhance firms’ images. In addition, they also perceived that the importance of ESG would become great in the future (85.9%) enough to make a significantly positive impact on firms’ productivity (72.8%). In addition to these findings about ESG, we further investigated how this young generation perceived the ethical business climate among South Korean companies. The results show that only 17.3% of respondents said South Korean business is ethical and 70.6% thought ethical problems would be a problem in the future. While the investigation for South Korean consumers’ perception of ESG and ethical business is not many, our work makes a significant theoretical contribution by providing empirical evidence on this issue. Our results are also managerially meaningful by being a reference to South Korean companies as well as global companies who are interested in the Korean market.
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