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The Millennial generation accounts for 27 per cent of the world’s population. These numbers highlight the current and future impact of Millennials on world economies, and they are arguably the most powerful consumer group. Interestingly, Millennials are also the least religious generation. Hence, there is a need to investigate further how they view the world from an ethical and religious perspective and whether their beliefs evolve over time. Therefore, the purpose of this study is, first, to compare and contrast any changes in ethical beliefs across time. Second, the study will compare and contrast any changes in religiousness across time, and finally, it explores the effects of consumers’ religiousness on ethical beliefs across time.

Using paper-based survey, the data collection took place in 2012, 2013, 2014 and 2016, resulting in 1,702 young respondents in total.

The results show that consumer ethics remain constant across time. Therefore, without intervention, individuals’ ethical behavior will remain unchanged. The results also indicate that Millennials understand the boundary between legal and illegal behavior. However, when the boundary becomes unclear, such as in situations in which they see no harm, downloading pirated software and recycling, Millennials were unsure and their religiousness affected their subsequent behavior. The study makes several contributions to consumer ethics and the impact of religiousness on ethical beliefs.

This study makes several contributions to consumer ethics research, especially whether young consumers’ ethical beliefs change or remain constant across time.

Given the well-documented outcomes of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, tobacco companies that exhibit CSR may be trusted and consumers may hold positive attitudes towards tobacco companies further contributing to and reinforcing smoking behaviours, which is a highly undesired and addictive behaviour. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to understand smokers and non-smokers views of CSR activities by Indonesian tobacco companies.

Data were collected from a large private university in Surabaya, Indonesia. There were 191 usable questionnaires with 91.7 per cent male and 8.3 per cent female. The number of smokers and non-smokers were evenly split, 49 per cent smokers and 51 per cent non-smokers which is slightly lower than the 67 per cent of male smokers in Indonesia. Of the 94 smokers in the sample, 69 per cent reported smoking on a daily basis.

The results of this study suggest that CSR activities are able to cultivate favourable images of the tobacco companies especially for those who are currently smoking. CSR in the domain of the tobacco industry increases people’s favourable association with the company. Moreover, the findings show that consumer-company identification does not affect company evaluation (CE) and consumer sensitivity towards corporate social performance becomes a motivator which positively affects CE among smokers.

This study has important implications for social marketing practice and research where the dominant focus remains on the downstream. In the case of smoking in Indonesia social marketing efforts directed towards mid and upstream may be more effective than downstream social marketing interventions which have to compete with global tobacco corporations.

This is one of the first studies to explore the impact of CSR and one of the first studies to examine Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country which exhibits a very high male smoking rate.