Drawing on neo‐institutional and stakeholder theory, this study examines the link between a firm's corporate social responsibility (CSR) actions and its financial performance. The authors investigate whether and how a firm's symbolic (“talk”) and substantive (“walk”) CSR actions, alone or combined, affect financial performance depending on the main stakeholder group they are directed at (i.e., high‐proximity internal stakeholders such as employees versus low‐proximity external stakeholders such as customers or the wider society). In a comparison of two domains targeting either high‐ or low‐proximity stakeholders, results show that substantive/symbolic CSR actions have a positive impact/no impact on financial performance if directed toward high‐proximity stakeholders, and that the opposite is true of actions directed at low‐proximity stakeholders. Further, results show that low‐proximity stakeholders have greater difficulty distinguishing between mere talk and real walk. The study relies on an international, cross‐industry dataset from Thomson Reuters’ Asset4ESG and Datastream from 2002 to 2011. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd and ERP Environment