How a firm communicates its CSR activities to its customers and other stakeholders will determine the success of these activities (Campbell & Kirmani, 2000). It can be said that the customers are like a judge and monitor the sincerity of a firm’s message. It is important that the customers get information from a neutral party instead of the firm. When the company advertises the CSR activities, the customers judge the activities as insincere; information by a neutral party is judged as sincere (Yoon et al., 2006). When the activity is seen as insincere, CSR campaigns backfire which leaves the firm with an even more negative reputation than they would have had when they did not started the campaign. This is supported by the findings of Campbell and Kirmani (2000). They found that customers judge the firm on their message and sincerity. A firm is insincere when the customers suspect the firm to have ulterior motivation when using a CSR campaign, especially if the firm advertises the campaign itself.
Expenditures also play an important role to determine the success. When customers find out that the advertisement cost are higher as the actual investment in the CSR activity they will be even more suspicious (Yoon et al., 2006). An illustrating example is Philip Morris. Phillip Morris is an international tobacco company. They spend 60 million dollars on a CSR activity but they spend 108 million dollars for communicating this CSR activity. This made the customers suspicious, which eventually led to the failure of the campaign.