Purpose This paper aims to use utilitarian benefits, hedonic benefits and corporate social responsibility to influence the consumer’s sense of brand identity and brand trust in social enterprise products and, thus, favourably affect repurchase intention. Design/methodology/approach This study dispatched 430 questionnaires in Taiwan. The top six social enterprises in the organic food industry in Taiwan that accounted for 84.0% of total green organic stores and they were selected for field investigation. This study used structural equation modelling. Findings The main path indicates that corporate social responsibility has a largely positive effect going through brand identity and brand trust, and then affecting the decision to repurchase. Therefore, the image of` corporate social responsibility was the greatest driving force. The secondary path indicated that utilitarian benefits positively affected brand identity and brand trust, which, in turn, positively affected repurchase intention. Therefore, utilitarian benefits were the secondary driving force of repurchasing social enterprise products. Practical implications This study indicates that social enterprises need to carry out effective corporate social responsibility to create a sense of strong brand trust in consumers’ minds. Empirical results can benefit social marketers for their product launches and promotions. Social enterprises can realize consumer differentiation preferences. With the effective grasp the information of consumer perception, the social marketers can turn passive into active and catch the marketing opportunities by the brand identity and trust to the content of the marketing programs design. Originality/value The novelty of this study is to propose an identity-repurchase intention (IRI) model, based on consumer information processing lens and self-congruency theory, to investigate the social enterprise perspective.
