THE IMPACT OF CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY ON BRAND AWARENESS OF TELECOMMUNICATION INDUSTRY IN GHANA

Background: Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has attracted a lot of attention from academics and CSR practitioners over the years. But there is no universally accepted definition of the term CSR. Aim: This paper examines the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on brand awareness construct of brand equity. Method: Extant literature reveals that little is known about CSR activities during an industrial crisis like covid-19 pandemic, most of the available research works in this area were carried out on developed countries and in the case of the telecommunication industry in Ghana, the scope of studies appear narrow as individual telecommunication companies were used as case studies and reported findings are inconclusive. Convenience sampling procedure was employed in which questionnaires were administered to 800 respondents across the 16 regions of Ghana. The field data was analyzed using inferential statistics (OLS regression and correlation analysis) and descriptive statistics. Findings: The study found that both ethical and philanthropic responsibilities of CSR positively relate to brand awareness and brand loyalty constructs of brand equity of the telecommunication industry in Ghana at statistically significant levels.


INTRODUCTION
Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has attracted a lot of attention from academics and CSR practitioners over the years. But there is no universally accepted definition of the term CSR. The concept of CSR as introduced by Bowen (1953) has gone through various changes over the years (McWilliams et al., 2006;Weyzig, 2009). It is stated that CSR information has existed in management, marketing and accounting literature over a long time (V. Sharma et al., 2018). However, little is known about CSR activities during an industrial crisis like covid-19 pandemic (Qiu et al., 2021). Most of the available research works in this area were carried out on developed countries (Yang & Basile, 2019) and in the case of the telecommunication industry in Ghana, the scope of studies appear narrow as individual telecommunication companies were used as case studies (Anlesinya et al., 2014;Solomon, 2017) and reported findings are inconclusive (Friedman, 2016;Sen & Bhattacharya, 2001).
The researchers therefore examined the relationship between ethical and philanthropic responsibilities of CSR and brand awareness construct of brand equity of the telecommunication industry in Ghana. Consistent with Alagidede et al. (2013), in spite of the various economic challenges in Ghana, the 2007 Ghana telecommunications Sector Performance Review in 2007 states that the telecommunication industry has made a remarkable and speedy progress and for that matter growth (Frempong, 2010). It has earned itself a title of a high contributor to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Ghana (Ameyaw, 2015). The major telecommunication firms in Ghana include AirtelTigo, Vodafon, Glo and MTN.
Extant literature reveals that all the telecommunications firms in Ghana have embraced CSR as part of their strategic programmes. MTN Ghana set up MTN Ghana foundation in 2007 as a CSR management structure for the MTN Group's related initiatives across its 22 operations. The CSR focus of the foundation includes health, education and economic empowerment. The foundation is funded by a proportion of profit after tax of each operating unit of MTN Ghana. Also, Vodafone Ghana Foundation was launched in 2009 as a CSR arm of Vodafone Ghana. It makes charitable contributions to communities, community groups and Non-Governmental Organisations in Ghana. The foundation is funded by Vodafone Ghana and Vodafone Group Foundation. Further, AirtelTigo makes a lot of contributions on education, sports and support for charity homes. Finally, Glo Ghana makes a lot of contributions towards CSR in the forms of CNN African Voices, Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature, National Football Teams, National Team Supporters Club and International Half Marathon (Abukari & Abdul-Hamid, 2018).
There are gaps in literature on CSR and brand awareness. The researchers found literature that states that there is no evidence that CSR has effect on returns during crisis or recovery period (Bae et al., 2021). This is contrary to the results of Albuquerque et al. (2020) which states that firms with higher CSR accrue improved stock performance in times of crisis. Also, it is reported that CSR activities bring confident and strong influence on Brand Awareness (Khan et al., 2020). However, the study of Khan et al. (2020) was topographically confined to Karachi which makes findings less representative. It is therefore important that further studies be carried out on a wider sample or regions, and this makes the current study a good call.
Further, literature indicates that even though China's consumer awareness of CSR is not adequate, customers are receptive to price, customers are more concern about quality and safety; it is commonly held that CSR is extremely a significant enterprise (Deng & Xu, 2017;Mei & Chen, 2021;E. Sharma, 2019). The authors however acknowledge error in the results of their work and the fact that the study was based on only HUAWEI (Mei & Chen, 2021). This paper examines the impact of corporate social responsibility (CSR) on brand awareness construct of brand equity in hopes to discover the relationship of each variable. This study investigated the relationships between ethical and philanthropic dimensions of CSR and brand awareness and brand loyalty constructs of brand equity of telecommunication firms in Ghana. This study was conducted against the backdrop of most previous studies focusing on developed economies as opposed to developing and emerging countries, and the fact that findings from such studies cannot be applied in a developing country context like Ghana. Further motivation for this study was derived from the failure of previous studies to have broader scope and coverage, concentrating on single telecommunication companies as case studies. Also, reported findings from previous studies were inconclusive and mixed. This study was therefore interested in solving these literature problems by investigating the relationship between ethical and philanthropic dimensions of CSR and brand awareness and brand loyalty constructs of brand equity of the telecommunication industry in Ghana.Hypotheses developed for the research are: 1) H1: There is a significant relationship between ethical responsibility of CSR and brand awareness; and 2) H2: There is a significant relationship between philanthropic responsibility of CSR and brand awareness.

METHOD
The study adopted quantitative research design and collected primary data from 600 customer-respondents across the 16 regions of Ghana using convenience sampling procedure. Structured questionnaire in the form of five-point Likert scale was used to collect the data. The field data was analyzed using inferential statistics (OLS regression and correlation analysis) and descriptive statistics.
To test our hypotheses, the researchers designed and administered questionnaires to customers of MTN Ghana, Vodafone, AitelTigo and Glo Ghana over the 16 regions of Ghana. A sample population of 800 customers consisting of 300 MTN,200 Vodafone,200 AirtelTigo and 100 Glo were targeted. However, 600 questionnaires were returned for analysis. The researchers adopted a convenient sampling technique of non-probability sampling method to recruit participants for the study. The research used multiple regression to analyse data that was gathered from the field as it was the most suitable for our study (Jeon, 2015).
Field data collected from respondents was first processed by checking the appropriateness of answers and completeness of the questionnaires filled by sorting and editing. Special codes were assigned to the questions before entered into the EVIEWS econometric software for computation or generation of quantitative data in the form of percentages and coefficients. Data analytical methods used include descriptive statistics in the form of mean, maximum, minimum, median and standard deviation were calculated for appropriate sections of the questionnaire. Multivariate regression analysis was carried out where the p-values and coefficients of explanatory variables constituted the basis of analyzing the influence of CSR on brand equity of telecommunication companies in Ghana.
This study adopted the Aaker (2009) model and Park (1992) measure of Brand Equity to investigate how CSR influences Brand Awareness of Telecommunication Industry in Ghana.
Following the examples of Gutiérrez Rodriguez (2017), Oliver (1997Oliver ( , 1999 and Dick and Basu (1994), the dimensions of CSR (ethics and philanthropy) and constructs of brand awareness were examined. The following multiple regression models were formulated for the investigation:

RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Demographic Data of Respondents
This section presents the results of the demographic data of the respondents sampled for the study. Demographic data examined for the purpose of this study are respondents' age, gender, educational level, telecommunication network association and years of using network.

H1: There is a Significant Relationship between Ethical Responsibility of CSR and Brand Awareness
The first hypothesis of this study sought to examine the relationship between ethical dimension of CSR and brand awareness in the telecommunication industry in Ghana. Table 2 reports the results generated from the data processing instrument. It must be noted that the field data was collected using a five-point Likert scale questionnaire which solicited the opinions of respondents on ethical responsibilities of telecommunication firms. The data collected was transformed quantitatively with the help of the Likert scale. The quantitative data was then modeled using OLS regression whose coefficients are presented for analysis in this section. The dependent variable is brand awareness.

H2: There is a Significant Relationship between Philanthropy and Brand Awareness
This section presents the results of data estimation on the second hypothesis of the study. This hypothesis is set out to investigate the relationship between philanthropic aspect of CSR and brand awareness among the customers of the telecommunication companies studied. Thus, the study was interested in investigating whether or not philanthropic services promote brand awareness among consumers of telecommunication services in Ghana. The OLS regression output containing the results is shown in Table 3.

Demographic Respondents
Revelation from the survey data in Table 1 shows that in terms of age groupings, the majority of the respondents (39.2 percent) were between the ages of 26 and 35 years while those in the 36 and 45 age group were 23.5 percent. Those in the 18 and 25 age bracket constituted 20.5 percent of the sample respondents. Respondents who fall within the 46 and 55 age limits also formed 10.8 percent. The age groupings as shown in this section suggest that the study sampled more youthful respondents who consume telecommunication services. The benefit of contacting these classes of respondents to the study is that answers obtained may represent the true views of a cross section of users of telecommunication services. For the gender dynamics, the results show that majority of the respondents (342) or 57 percent of the participants were female while the remaining 43percent were males. The indication is that more females were contacted as opposed their male counterparts.
Under the education categories, it is shown that majority of the respondents (270) who constituted 45 percent had tertiary education qualifications while 156 respondents representing 26 percent of the total sample were having Senior High School (SHS) qualifications as against 68 respondents (11.3 percent) who had Junior High School (JHS) or basic education background. The remaining 17.7 percent of the respondents had other education certifications including vocational and technical backgrounds. It may be stated that since majority of the respondents contacted had tertiary education fields, their level of independent reasoning and judgment may not be questioned. In the end, engaging highly educated respondents for data collection can contribute to making the process less cumbersome and ensure credibility of results.
Table 1.0 further shows that with regards to employment status, exactly 50 percent of the respondents were engaged in some king of employment while 37.3 percent of the respondents were students. The remaining number of respondents who make up 12.7 percent were unemployed. These figures on employment status can provide indication that consuming telecommunication services may not necessarily depend on one's employment status. Communication and information sharing may not be regarded as a luxurious good but a necessity and this can explain why the people who are unemployed are customers.
The data relating to the service provider that respondents associate show that majority of the respondents (305) or 50.8 percent of the respondents were customers of MTN, followed by Vodafone having 32 percent of the respondents and then AirtelTigo with 10 percent of the respondents. The Glo telecommunication company had 43 respondents or 7.2 percent of the total sample size. The results seem to reflect the relative strength of the companies in terms of their customer base in Ghana and so MTN Ghana having the largest number of respondents is not surprising since it arguably has the largest customer base in the country.
Lastly, the study set out to ascertain how long respondents have been customers of their preferred telecommunication service providers; and the survey data reports that majority (366) of the sampled respondents, representing 61 percent had been users of mobile telecommunication services from 5 to 8 years. This is followed by the next 111 respondents (18.5 %) who have been customers from 1 to 4 years running. Overall, the demographic data gathered from the survey activity provides the basis to suggest that the results and findings obtained from the analysis of data can be fairly generalized given that customers of all the telecommunication companies constituted the respondents for the study.

OLS Regression Output 1: Relationship between Ethics and Brand Awareness
The model is characterized by R-squared of 0.653971 and an Adjusted R-squared of 0.650470. The F-statistics stood at 186.7886 with a probability of 0.000000, which is significant at 1 percent. These figures suggest that approximately 65 percent of the variation in the dependent variable is jointly explained by the independent variables in the model, and that the model is quite well specified with the predictive power of the model averagely good. The Durbin-Watson test statistic stood at 0.591884, indicating the presence of serial autocorrelation in the model. Table 2.0 reveals that ethical dimensions of CSR have statistically meaningful contributions to changes in brand awareness of customers of telecommunication companies studied. Each of the dimensions of ethical CSR selected for the examination positively accounts for the creation of brand awareness among customers. The numerical coefficients of 'Societal expectations' and 'societal moral norms' respectively stood at 0.081732 and 0.010375 with p-values of 0.3965 and 0.9109 respectively. These results suggest that acting in accordance with societal expectations and subsequently respecting or upholding societal moral, ethical values and norms can create brand awareness for telecommunication companies but the coefficients are not statistically significant, meaning that these dimensions do not play any role in the creation of brand awareness efforts.
The other variables or dimensions of ethical CSR including uncompromising ethical norms, definite corporate behavior, corporate integrity and corporate environmental policies have positive significant relationship with brand awareness. The coefficient of uncompromising ethical norms stood at 0.410741 with a p-value of 0.0000, significant at 1 percent while that of definite corporate behavior was 0.083724, also with a p-value of 0.0000. The statistics show the coefficient of corporate integrity and corporate environmental policies as 0.408497 and 0.087100 with their respective p-values being 0.0000 and 0. 0061.These probability values are also significant at 1 percent.
The above results indicate that all else equal, in situations where telecommunication companies promote social and ethical norms and have a well-defined organizational culture which dictates corporate behavior, brand awareness may be improved. Similarly, it can be deduced that the availability of corporate policies that promote ethical environmental practices can propel brand awareness. Based on these results, it can be argued that upholding ethical standards in all its dimensions in the business of providing telecommunication services can stimulate the process of creating brand awareness which can ultimately contribute to building the firms' brand image, reputation and bottom-line performance. Table 3.0 offers solution to the problem of determining whether or not philanthropic CSR statistically relate to brand awareness in the telecommunication industry in Ghana. Therefore, to answer the question of "What is the relationship between philanthropic responsibility of CSR and brand awareness?" Table 3.0 provides some econometric insights regarding this relationship. The results then advocate that brand awareness among consumers of telecommunication services is jointly accounted for by philanthropic services proxied by indicators of charitable expectations, voluntary participation in charitable activities, and voluntary participation in activities of public and private educational institutions, corporate voluntary community projects, corporate charitable donations and corporate sponsorship programs. However, in terms of statistical significance, only three philanthropic variables dictate changes in brand awareness. These are corporate voluntary community projects, corporate charitable donations and corporate sponsorship programs. The numerical coefficients are 0.124369, 0.094109 and 0.811626 for corporate voluntary community projects, corporate charitable donations and corporate sponsorship programs respectively with the corresponding probabilities of 0.0249, 0.0185 and 0.0000, significant at 5 percent, 5 percent and 1 percent respectively.

OLS Regression Output 2: Relationship between Philanthropy and Brand Awareness
The deductions from these results can be stated that consumers of telecommunication services may become more aware of the firms' brand if the firms reach out to the larger population with visible philanthropic CSR interventions and social welfare enhancing initiatives. For example, making generous donations to the less privileged and vulnerable groups in society such as orphanages, prisons, leprosarium may entrench the knowledge and presence of telecommunication companies in community members. In this way, it may be argued that engaging in philanthropic CSR activities can be a source of improving the corporate brand image, reputation and performance and that through philanthropy the relationship between the public and the corporation can be made better and rewarding. Using philanthropic activities as a solution tool for treating social problems can create enduring appreciation and awareness among opinion leaders and community members. Conclusion and future areas of research are presented at the next section.

CONCLUSION
The study found that both ethical and philanthropic responsibilities of CSR positively relate to brand awareness and brand loyalty constructs of brand equity of the telecommunication industry in Ghana at statistically significant levels.
The implications from the findings are that engaging in CSR initiatives supports the "doing well by doing good" notion and can generally improve the companies' bottom line. Specifically, the inference from the findings is that upholding ethical norms, behaving as a corporate citizen ethically, as well as having corporate environmental policies and implementing such policies through operational activities can translate into increased awareness and loyalty for telecommunication companies, which in turn can be a source of competitive advantage. Customer loyalty is likely to improve if telecommunication firms assume responsibility for the environmental issues emanating from their business operations and become accountable, honest and respect the communities they operate. This is because operating on ethical standards and social responsibility can induce real customer consumption purchases and choices and by extension brand recognition, awareness, customer attraction and retention and ultimately brand loyalty.
Further inference from the findings of this study is that corporate philanthropic gestures such as charitable donations, community projects, and sponsorship programs, although are discretionary and voluntary, can do the wonders of improving stakeholder perception, brand image and reputation and put the company in the 'good books' of the community and consequently engender brand awareness and customer loyalty. This is possible if telecommunication firms consider philanthropy as a strategic marketing tool which they can pursue towards business differentiation and market dominance as well as a means of satisfying societal expectations, requirements and demands.
Based on the conclusion of the study, we recommend that managers of telecommunication firms implement policies that will mitigate the environmental impacts of their operations on the communities in which they operate and make their philanthropic initiatives and projects visibly known to the general public. Although this research contributes to existing academic and practitioner knowledge, every research has limitations that can be addressed by future research. Therefore, further research can adopt both quantitative and qualitative methods since this study adopted quantitative method, broaden the scope of further study by expanding the dimensions of CSR and constructs of brand loyalty since this study used two dimensions of CSR (ethics and philanthropy) and one constructs of brand equity (brand awareness).