Corporate social advocacy and gender equality: how call-to-action messages influence corporate reputation

From corporate social responsibility to corporate social advocacy

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has grown in recent decades to become one of the central research fields in public relations and strategic communication. Many studies assume that, besides their economic function, companies have a broader responsibility to society, including sustainable operations, ethical behavior and philanthropic measures (Carroll and Brown, 2018). According to stakeholder theory, the interests of a company's stakeholders must be fulfilled to ensure tangible and intangible corporate assets in the medium and long term (Freeman, 1984). In this context, CSR communication is supposed to secure or improve the legitimacy and reputation of a company (e.g. Bachmann and Ingenhoff, 2016; Colleoni, 2013; Lock and Schulz-Knappe, 2019). Authors have increasingly drawn attention to political forms of CSR (Ingenhoff and Marschlich, 2019; van der Meer and Jonkman, 2021). Scholars argue that the politicization of companies is related to the increased visibility of corporations due to mediatization and polarization (van der Meer and Jonkman, 2021). The political polarization in society can be observed around socially relevant issues, such as social equality and discrimination, environmental sustainability, or immigration (van der Meer and Jonkman, 2021), on which companies increasingly take a stand, even if it is not related to their core business (Dodd and Supa, 2014). In this new social environment, companies find themselves in a dichotomy between the expectation to speak out on (morally and emotionally charged) social issues with global relevance to retain their social license to operate (van der Meer and Jonkman, 2021) and running the risk of being boycotted if consumer groups do not accept their socio-political commitment (Rim et al., 2020).

Against this background, new forms of corporate social engagement have emerged, including CSA (Dodd and Supa, 2014, 2015), corporate and chief executive officer (CEO) activism (Chatterji and Toffel, 2019), corporate diplomacy (Marschlich and Ingenhoff, 2021) and political CSR (Ingenhoff and Marschlich, 2019). The distinction between the terms is not always precise, and they are sometimes used synonymously. What most of the approaches have in common is that companies express public support for individuals or groups (Ciszek and Logan, 2018), taking a stand on a social issue (Eilert and Nappier Cherup, 2020) to induce others to do the same and ultimately promote social change (Eilert and Nappier Cherup, 2020). From a strategic communication perspective, communicating about socio-political issues is relevant as it can affect corporate reputation (Abitbol et al., 2018).

Our study relies on CSA, considering it a new form of CSR (Dodd and Supa, 2014; Hong and Li, 2020). The difference between CSA and CSR is that CSA mainly tackles issues that are not connected to the core business (Dodd and Supa, 2014, 2015) and that it involves public statements on social issues, i.e. topics that are discussed in public, which are often polarizing and controversial (Hong and Li, 2020). In contrast, CSR mainly involves philanthropic activities that are non-controversial and non-polarizing. The perspective on the company also differs between the two constructs. Both terms have in common that companies engage in efforts and issues that are not primarily supposed to serve corporate self-interests but at least support the company's stake (see Dodd and Supa, 2014, 2015). While CSR scholars disagree on the extent to which CSR efforts are connected to the company's core business, the CSA literature suggests that the “social-political issues addressed by organizations are divorced from issues of particular relevance to the organization” in the case of CSA (Dodd and Supa, 2015, p. 289). Troy et al. (2023) likewise pointed out that the difference between CSA and CSR messages is that CSA messages include a call for change going beyond the companies' core business.

Ciszek and Logan (2018) defined CSA as “the public support for individuals, groups, ideals, or values that is intended to persuade others to do the same” (p. 118). Eilert and Nappier Cherup (2020) even noted that corporate activism aims to create societal change by influencing a company's institutional environment by taking a stand on issues of public concern. Ciszek and Logan (2018) noted that CSA has much in common with public relations; both advocate for justice and equality. They further concluded that public relations could help “organizations define their values, strategically communicate, and fight for social justice causes” (p. 125). Building on the literature review, we define CSA communication as the communication efforts of companies to take a stance on a socially relevant issue that is (potentially) discussed controversially in the public sphere, thereby expressing societal values and norms. CSA communication aims to contribute to society, for instance, by promoting equality and positively influencing the public's perception of the company.

CSA, corporate reputation and gender equality

When companies take a stand on socio-political issues, this can affect the public perception of companies (Dodd and Supa, 2014; Kim, 2019), including their reputation (Lim and Young, 2021). Corporate reputation can generally be understood as a collective perception of a company resulting from its actions (Fombrun et al., 2000) and its ability to meet public expectations regarding its decisions (Eisenegger, 2005). For companies, it is highly relevant to maintain a (positive or strong) reputation as it can benefit corporate financial outcomes (Roberts and Dowling, 2002) or positively affect relationships with the public and other stakeholder groups (Fombrun and van Riel, 2003).

While some studies situate reputation predominantly at the cognitive level (e.g. Fombrun et al., 2000), others consider emotions part of reputation (e.g. Deephouse, 2000). In the first case, Fombrun et al. (2000) defined corporate reputation as “a cognitive representation of a company's actions and results that crystallizes the firm's ability to deliver valued outcomes to its stakeholders” (p. 87). Integrating cognitive and emotional attributes, Deephouse (2000) defined corporate reputation as the “evaluation of a firm by its stakeholders in terms of their affect, esteem, [and] knowledge” (p. 1093). Walker (2010) systematically reviewed previous definitions of corporate reputation. He pointed out that corporate reputation is reflected in a positive or a negative and critical attitude toward the company, is temporal and comparative and can be issue-specific and thus change over time and across issues. Walsh and Beatty (2007) emphasized that corporate reputation relates to the evaluator's recognition and interpretation of “what the firm stands for” (p. 129). Hence, as a value-driven communication effort, CSA is often moral in nature and concerned with (frequently contested) social issues of public concern and is expected to affect corporate reputation. Building on the literature, we define corporate reputation as individuals' perception of a company reflecting the evaluation of the outcomes of a company's actions.

Previous research has examined the relationships between CSA and various constructs, including purchase intentions (e.g. Dodd and Supa, 2014), consumer responses such as boycott intentions (e.g. Rim et al., 2020), corporate and brand attitudes (e.g. Klostermann et al., 2022), corporate reputation (Abitbol et al., 2018; Lim and Young, 2021), or general perceptions of the company (Troy et al., 2023) indicating mixed results. Lim and Young (2021) explored the effects of Ben & Jerry's advocacy of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) rights on the company's reputation. They found positive effects of CSA on corporate reputation provided that the advocacy efforts are perceived as authentic and fit the brand's identity and the public expectations about the brand's values. Abitbol et al. (2018) examined CSA in the case of Starbucks' Race Together campaign and showed that corporate reputation suffered from the campaign, but financial returns were not affected. The authors explained the negative association with a lack of company-cause-fit.

Perceptions of CSA are related to the issue the company is advocating for (see also Walker, 2010 on the relationship between corporate reputation and issues). In this study, we address the issue of gender equality. Gender equality is a socially relevant issue on a global level. For example, the United Nations has identified gender equality as a central pillar of its Sustainable Development Goals (United Nation, 2023). Many corporations already engage in that issue, e.g. providing information to raise awareness or create initiatives on this topic. Gender equality is, therefore, a highly relevant and widespread social issue and thus relevant for corporate communication practices and society. In addition, it is a public issue that people from different social classes and backgrounds and with varying levels of education and income find relevant. Finally, the issue of gender equality can be seen as political, such that in many countries, policy-makers are enacting various measures to equalize conditions for women and men (e.g. by introducing paternity leave, recommendations on quotas for women in the workforce, especially in management positions, etc.). Therefore, the issue lends itself very well to the present study.

CSA communication strategies: the effect of the call to action

Within the existing literature on CSA and its effects on the perception of companies, too little attention has been paid to the role of communication itself, i.e. the role that different communication strategies may have, with few exceptions. Zhang and Zhou (2023) examined the effect of communicating different CSA positions (pro versus anti) and found that the message type is less relevant to the individuals' reactions to CSA communication. In contrast, the individuals' preexisting attitudes regarding the advocated issue in interaction with the CSA position can lead to cognitive dissonance, negatively affecting consumer reactions to CSA (Zhang and Zhou, 2023). Troy et al. (2023) examined whether CSR and CSA messaging affect corporate perceptions differently. The CSA message, compared to the CSR message, included a call for change. However, the study found no significant differences between both message types and their effects (Troy et al., 2023). Regarding support intentions, prior research found that psychological traits, including individuals' self-efficacy, were positively related to individuals' word-of-mouth intentions to support CSA efforts (Kim et al., 2023). In practice, we can observe that companies such as Ben & Jerry's or Patagonia use various strategies to communicate about socio-political issues in terms of CSA to maintain their reputation. They can make a public statement on the social issue to express their perception of the issue, or they can go one step further and ask the public to take action on the social issue as more and more corporations do in practice. As such, Ben & Jerry's asked their customers several times to actively support their efforts, e.g. by signing a petition to stop mining in the Grassy Narrows Territory in Ontario, Canada, a sovereign and protected area (Ben & Jerry's, 2021).

While previous scholars studied different aspects of CSA that may affect the public responses to CSA (e.g. Dodd and Supa, 2015; Rim et al., 2022; Zhou and Dong, 2022) and research outlined different types of corporate advocacy efforts, including raising political voices by asking for public support regarding a petition (e.g. You and Hon, 2022), little is known about whether a public call to action may affect corporate reputation positively or negatively, if at all. As Vasquez (2022) emphasized, scholarship needs to investigate more the communication of CSA, the call to action, and the public responses to it, “as corporations can use their voice to shape public opinion and influence policy-makers to take action” (p. 12). A call to action makes CSA efforts much more engaging and may lead to societal change if individuals follow it. However, companies often fear attracting negative coverage or being boycotted due to their CSA engagements. We argue that the potential boycott versus support is related to the message strategy they apply to reach their stakeholders, which may cause psychological reactance (Brehm, 1966) and lead to adverse effects. Since CSA efforts with a call to action can more and more be observed in corporate practices, we pose the following research question:

So far, research on corporate communication efforts that include a call to action lacks significantly. According to Suchman (1995), the effectiveness of the communication efforts that seek to improve perceptions and evaluations of companies depends on the degree of the call for public support. Accordingly, if organizations seek active public support, like through a call to action, the threshold of gaining legitimacy is higher compared to if an organization does not ask for public support because the audience needs to evaluate the company's procedure more accurately, i.e. they are cognitively more engaged when processing the message (Suchman, 1995). Since legitimacy and reputation overlap and can be considered similar regarding audience perceptions (see Deephouse and Carter, 2005), we apply Suchman's (1995) argument to our study and pose the following hypothesis.

The mediating role of reactance and the identification with the company

One major challenge for corporate communications is individuals' perception of persuasion intents, e.g. the feeling of individuals that a company, with its self-interests, intends to convince them of its arguments. The phenomenon of persuasion intent has already been studied in CSR communication (Bachmann and Ingenhoff, 2016). Particularly when it comes to companies' socio-political activities and thus also CSA initiatives, people tend to be skeptical, for instance, because individuals perceive self-interest as the underlying motive of a company's social engagement instead of altruism (e.g. Viererbl and Koch, 2022). As Bachmann and Ingenhoff (2016) showed, skepticism toward CSR can lead to reactance, threatening corporate legitimacy, and thus, it may also harm the corporate reputation. According to reactance theory, reactance describes temporary psychological arousal that arises when people feel restricted in their personal freedom and want to counteract this perceived loss of freedom (Brehm, 1966). This may involve adopting a defensive stance toward the received message. Åkestam et al. (2017) described that “an individual experiencing reactance to a stimulus becomes more resistant to persuasion” (p. 797).

Following the argument by Suchman (1995) that the legitimation attempts of companies seeking public support involve a higher (cognitive) engagement of the audience that evaluates the company and its efforts, we argue that CSA with a call to action may cause (more) reactance because individuals might spend more efforts thinking about it and feel persuasion intent. Accordingly, we hypothesize the following:

Previous research outlined that CSR communication and other forms of corporate communication that include political or social issues might enhance feelings of identification with the company (e.g. Eberle et al., 2013), which was found to play a critical role in affecting corporate reputation (Eberle et al., 2013; Kim, 2019). Since CSA, at its core, involves the communication of values and is concerned chiefly with morally charged or even polarizing issues, it seems plausible that CSA communication affects an individual's identification with the company. This argument is further supported by previous research, indicating that the congruence between companies' social and political efforts and individuals' values is central to achieving positive effects of corporate advocacy on perceptions of a company and behavioral intentions toward corporate actions (Weber et al., 2023). At the same time, as Zhang and Zhou (2023) emphasized, consumer-company identification can negatively influence individuals' reactions to CSA through cognitive dissonance in case of incongruence between individuals' attitudes towards an issue and the advocated CSA issue.

Building on social identity theory, Bhattacharya and Sen (2003) argued that some companies “represent and offer attractive, meaningful social identities to consumers that help them satisfy important self-definitional needs” (p. 77), which then results in individuals identifying with the company and their efforts. In this paper, identification with a company is conceived in the sense of “consumer-company identification” (Bhattacharya and Sen, 2003) as the extent to which individuals perceive a congruence between the values that define their self-identity and the companies' efforts (Du et al., 2007). Since CSA messages with a call to action are more encouraging, they might give individuals a more “meaningful social identity” than CSA messages without a call to action. Moreover, Bhattacharya and Sen (2003) explained that a company's identity reflects its core values, which is probably more visible in the case of CSA messages with a call to action. Thus, we argue that they might lead to a higher identification with the company than CSA messages without a call to action.

As outlined, higher levels of identification with the company were found to increase the perceived reputation of a company in the case of CSR and CSA (Eberle et al., 2013; Kim, 2019), while lower levels of identification can cause cognitive dissonance, which may threaten corporate reputation (Hong and Li, 2020; Zhang and Zhou, 2023). Likewise, previous research indicates that when individuals' opinions differ from the company's stand, which lowers the identification with the company, individuals may perceive the company negatively, resulting in a more negative or lower corporate reputation (Chatterji and Toffel, 2019). This leads to our next hypothesis:

Exploring whether corporations should take a stand on socially relevant issues, Xu et al. (2022) found that consumer identification with the company mediates the relationship between individuals' psychological distance and behavioral intentions toward the company. Overall, the identification of a consumer and the company increased with higher levels of perceived psychological distance from the company, resulting in increased buycott and boycott intentions. The authors conclude that other mechanisms must play a role in explaining these possibly competing results (Xu et al., 2022). We argue that the psychological distance from the company that was found to affect the identification with a company might be related to psychological states that result from (cognitively) engaging with a CSA message. Therefore, we posit that individuals might feel less identified with the company when they perceive a message as persuasive and thus feel threatened in their personal freedom to decide or act, i.e. their level of reactance increases. In other words, when individuals feel companies want to convince them through their CSA message to follow the cause or support the company, they may react with reactance and disidentify with the company as a counteract. This leads to the following hypothesis:

All hypotheses are summarized in our model (see Figure 1).

Experimental design and procedure

Our research aimed to determine the effects of two CSA message strategies on corporate reputation on an individual's perception level. Thus, we used a single-factor (CSA messages without/with a call to action) between-subjects experimental design. We conducted an experimental online survey in the German-speaking region of Switzerland between September and October 2021. The survey participants were randomly assigned to the experimental (CSA message with a call to action) or the control group (CSA message without a call to action) upon clicking on the survey link via a built-in randomizing function provided by the survey tool (LimeSurvey).

The study received ethical approval from a large university in Switzerland, including the use of real brands for the stimulus material. The chosen brands were contacted via e-mail with the option to opt out of the study, and participants were debriefed about the fictional content of the stimulus messages. At the beginning of the survey, participants were informed about the study and had to give informed consent. Subsequently, participants were asked about their issue alignment with gender equality and the predispositions toward the companies presented later on in the stimulus material. Next, we showed the participants the stimulus containing a manipulated tweet depicting a CSA message with or without a call to action. Upon reading the stimulus material, we asked the participants questions to assess their identification with the company, reactance level, assessment of corporate reputation and demographics. Moreover, we included items to check the manipulation.

Sample

The initial sample consisted of 215 participants. In the data cleaning process, those participants who did not complete the manipulation check were excluded, as well as outliers. The final sample consisted of 172 participants from the German-speaking part of Switzerland, wherein 83 people were in the experimental group and 89 were in the control group. The sample comprised 46.5% female, 51.7% male and 1.7% non-binary participants. People aged 21 to 86 completed the survey (M = 42.9). 50.0% of participants held at least a university degree at Bachelor's level. The participants' political leanings were assessed on a scale from strongly left-leaning (1) to strongly right-leaning (5), which resulted in a mean of 2.52, indicating a reasonably politically balanced but slightly left-leaning. The participants were recruited via an email containing a generic description of the study and a link to the survey on LimeSurvey. No incentive was used for recruitment.

A randomization check was conducted to assess the balance of the participants across the two groups (experimental and control groups). Chi-square tests were conducted, revealing no significant association for gender (χ²(2) = 0.73, p = 0.69), completed education level (χ²(6) = 2.85, p = 0.72), or income (χ²(5) = 3.80, p = 0.58). An independent samples t-test was conducted which revealed no significant difference in the mean age between the groups, t(177) = 0.46, p = 0.65. These findings provide evidence of successful randomization, i.e. participants' gender, level of completed education, income and age were evenly distributed across the experimental conditions.

Stimulus and pretest of the stimulus

Considering how ubiquitous strategic communication of companies via their social media channels is, we used a manipulated Twitter post as the experimental stimulus material. To maintain external validity, two actual and well-known companies were chosen as the authors of the tweets. The companies Dior and Armani were picked as a result of the pretest, considering their widespread notoriety and range of products that could appeal to female and male customers alike, as well as their well-documented issue alignment with previous campaigns surrounding gender equality. Dior's creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, has gone public with her feminist views, going as far as creating the well-known “We Should All Be Feminist” t-shirt for the brand. Giorgio Armani of the namesake brand has also gone on record stating his favorability for gender-neutral fashion that doesn't objectify women's bodies, thus taking a public feminist stand (cf. Di Lello, 2019; Yotka, 2016). The plausibility of the stimulus messages being associated with previous communication from the chosen brands is expected to create external validity, thus reducing confounding factors in the survey results.

The tweet in the control group was: “A study shows that if men received their yearly pay on January 1st, women would have to work for free until February 20th (source: bit.ly/EqualPay). On this #EqualPayDay, our company renews its commitment to give men and women equal pay for equal work [1].” In contrast, the tweet containing a call to action (experimental group) stated: “To take a stand against the gender pay gap, all female employees of our company will receive a #FeminismBonus to mark this year's #EqualPayDay. Join us and sign the petition on bit.ly/FeminismBonus to encourage other companies to do the same!” The messages were pretested (N = 10) to ensure the manipulation would be perceived as intended. To avoid any bias provoked by social cues, the number of likes, comments and retweets was kept consistent across all stimulus materials and reflected the typical range of likes, comments and retweets found on actual posts of the companies.

Measures