Despite the widely acknowledged importance of corporate social responsibility (CSR) communications, our knowledge is limited with regard to various factors affecting consumer responses to such communication efforts. This paper aims to identify the extent to which prior brand familiarity influences consumer responses to CSR communications through a controlled experiment, exploring whether the use of different communication functions for environmental domain of CSR (i.e., publicity and advertising) generates any different effect on these responses. Findings reveal that familiar and unfamiliar brands do not differ from each other with regard to consumer attitude toward message, but elicit dissimilar responses in terms of attitude toward brand and purchase intentions. The study leads to managerial implications regarding the effective formulation and dissemination of CSR‐related messages in order to achieve stakeholder engagement. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment