| Abstract: |
Brands are facing heightened pressure from consumers to address social justice
issues via social media channels. However, little guidance has been provided
about whether and how a brand should engage in such conversations online. We
use a multi-discipline, multi-data, and multi-method approach to clarify the
conditions under which social justice activism impacts consumers' brand
evaluations, as well as the effective social media response strategies that
brands can use. Through secondary data analysis on Twitter and two randomized
experiments, we find that social justice activism and brand type (low
communal, high communal) interact to affect consumers' brand evaluations. In
online contexts that feature social justice activism, consumers evaluate high
(vs. low) communal brands less favorably. Yet, in online contexts devoid of
social justice activism, these evaluation differences are attenuated. We
attribute these findings to differences in the extent to which high versus low
communal brands are perceived to comply with relationship norms in a social
justice activism context. We show that such differences can be attenuated when
brands utilize a high empathy response on social media to engage in social
justice conversations. Our findings contribute to the literature on social
justice and IS, brand relationships, and crisis communication. |