Today in Digital Marketing - Social Causes: When Good Deeds Go Bad

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Monday, May 29th, and as it is a holiday in the U.S., we will not have a regular show today. But instead, we give you this deep dive interview into some recent marketing science research regarding brands and how some might be missing the mark when it comes to their support for social causes. In fact, missing it so bad might be hurting their sales. This aired first exclusively on the Premium podcast feed. There are 30 other deep dive episodes there about recent marketing science findings. Plus, when you

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Starting point is 00:01:03 Join free at Rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.C-A. We've heard the advice before. Make sure your brand is supporting some social causes and talk about that support on your social media. Doing so is basically a free pass to better brand perception, right? Take the recent Black Lives Matter movement. Did your brand donate? Did you put related hashtags on some tweets? Maybe even turn your channel over to a black influencer? Well, you should be good. Or should you? What if the advice we've been given all this time about support for social causes has been wrong? So wrong, in fact, it's actually been hurting your brand.

Starting point is 00:01:52 Yang Wang is an assistant professor of marketing at the Fox School of Business at Temple University. He and his colleagues have just published some new research in the Journal of Marketing Science. His paper is called How Support for Black Lives Matter Impacts Consumer Responses on Social Media. He joins me now from Madison, Wisconsin. Dr. Wang, welcome. Thank you. Glad to be on. So let's get to the top results then. How does support for Black Lives Matter impact those consumer responses on social media? Thanks for asking. So in our research, we tried to look at one major event.

Starting point is 00:02:32 So if your listeners recall, this is when all of the protests were going down during the middle of the pandemic. A lot of companies went on Instagram and posted black squares, which were for this Blackout Tuesday. Blackout Tuesday. Right. Right. So we use this as sort of like a major event to look at firms that participated because it was mostly isolated to Instagram and a lot of other social media platforms didn't really have like the change in the number of followers that they got, the number of likes that they received after they participated in Blackout Tuesday on Instagram versus their own accounts on Twitter, which after filtering out for the brands that did not participate. So within this between-brand comparison, what we showed is that the brand's Instagram accounts lost followers relative to their Twitter accounts.

Starting point is 00:03:27 And this is, we think, pretty good causal evidence of participation effects negatively impacting how consumers are engaging with your brand. But we find this effect is very robust to different types of analyses, including one where we looked at all of the historical BLM-related posts by the brands. And in that second study, what we found was that this negative backlash from consumers, as far as the social media backlash goes, is sort of isolated to instances where lots of other brands are also simultaneously supporting BLM. So in the case where there's few brands supporting it, we don't see much of a negative impact.

Starting point is 00:04:15 But when lots of brands are doing it, the brands that choose to participate tend to get backlash. It seems so counterintuitive. Why do you think this is happening? Yeah, so I think our explanation is kind of consistent with some of the existing research that's been performed in labs. And the idea is that, you know, the consumers are not naive, right? They can understand when brands are sort of taking advantage of the moment and not really being authentic to their typical operations, right? So maybe you never supported anything like this before. And because everybody else is doing it, right, the perception is that, you know, you're just joining on the bandwagon or jumping on the bandwagon. And we find this authenticity explanation is consistent with a lot of the other effects that we have found.

Starting point is 00:05:05 So, for instance, brands that have pro-social missions, mission statements that guide their operations that are generally supporting pro-social causes. They have some mission beyond financial gains. These brands also did not suffer when they participated in Blackout Tuesday. We found that brands that historically posted things that were supporting minority groups also did not suffer when they participated during Blackout Tuesday. I wonder if this is related to the post about or the comment you had in your paper about slacktivism. In your study, you said brands with Republican supporters experienced, of course, more backfiring effects of BLM support, as I think one would expect. But you said this can be partially mitigated through slacktivism. What is slacktivism?

Starting point is 00:05:56 And isn't it bad? I think slacktivism in our paper, how we operationalize it is whether or not you donated or announced that you donated money to the cause at the same time of posting messages supporting the cause. And yeah, we find this really interesting divergent effect of slacktivism for Republican brands that have mostly Republican consumers and brands that have mostly Democratic consumers. So for Democratic consumers, if you practice slacktivism, so you support BLM, but don't say anything about donating, then the effects are backfiring, they become negative. But if you are a Republican brand, and you practice slacktivism, we find that the effects are actually neutral to maybe slightly positive, which is very interesting. I think we don't go into the exact mechanisms. We don't have evidence of this. But I think my speculation is that if consumers,

Starting point is 00:06:57 your customers expect you to participate because there's all this social pressure to participate, then if your consumers are not aligned with this issue, then the least commitment you can show to participating might actually relieve the concerns about some of your consumers who are misaligned with the movement. You studied the effect on social media, not on harder numbers like sales figures or stock price, but do you have a gut feel on how those would be affected? Would negative social media always mean negative financials?

Starting point is 00:07:28 No, in fact, I think there's some good research by other groups that have come out recently on this Goya Beans incident. I don't know if you're familiar with this, where I think the founder or the CEO of the Goya Beans company basically went on air to support Trump on Twitter. And then they got a bunch of backlash from liberal consumers who were going on social media saying, we're not going to buy your beans anymore. And what they found was that consumers, there was indeed this backlash on social media, but actually the opposite of that was the sort of the conservative consumers were actually going out and buying more of these beans because of the, you know, they wanted to counter the narrative that's going on on social media. So in fact, what they found was on average, the sales effects was actually positive from that negative social media inducing event. So you could have very different social media versus immediate financial consequences. But there's also a lot of literature that suggests that the social media impact on your long-term brand image is very important. And that could have set you up for long-term financial losses in terms of losing customers in the long run or not being able to

Starting point is 00:08:59 gain these customers who are opposed to your cause in the long run. So it's a complicated calculus for businesses. It's sort of a balance between your current customers, what they want, and the backlash that you're going to get from the PR and maybe how you want to position your brand in the long term. Is there any way to measure or forecast that before you decide on whether you're going to support and how you're going to support a social cause? Yeah. So, you know, based on our research, if you are just looking at the immediate social media and, you know, response to your actions, what we find is that what you need is sort of consistency, right? So if you decide to go down this route,

Starting point is 00:09:43 you need to be consistent with it, right? So if you're going to support this route, you need to be consistent with it, right? So if you're going to support one cause, you probably want to support, you know, all the sort of relevant causes that your consumers will care about, right? Don't try to pick and choose, don't try to, you know, only jump in when lots of other brands are doing it. So this consistency, which goes back to this authenticity principle, I think is the key here. So if you haven't been doing this consistently and you want to change, there's probably going to be a painful transition period before consumers can now be aligned with your brand image or you gain the new consumers who you want to attract with this new pro-social brand image. And there are a lot of social causes popular right now. You know, in the U.S., I'm thinking stop Asian hate, gun control, abortion, LGBTQ rights. I know you only studied the Black Lives Matter movement and in particular that one portion of it.

Starting point is 00:10:37 But do you think your findings would also apply to other big social causes? Yeah, I think the way we think about the Black Lives Matter movement is that it's a social cause on racial lines. And I think, especially in the United States, that's a very specific type of social cause, right? So if gun violence, for example, may not have the same type of reaction from all sides, right? So like, you know, banning the sales of guns. If you come out and say something along those lines, I don't think our research would necessarily speak to those types of social causes,

Starting point is 00:11:13 but for maybe Asian hate, that may be aligned. Again, I think that's also, as an academic, I'm always hesitant to make broad generalizations that are outside of what our data show. I would say that would be an interesting test. My gut feeling is that it probably has similar type of impacts on the consumers. We are doing some extensions to this paper, but not looking at other causes, but looking at the

Starting point is 00:11:45 brands that do not participate during Blackout Tuesday, which I think is also an interesting angle to think about. So this is still ongoing research. It has not been published yet, but what we find is that among the brands that didn't participate during Blackout Tuesday, they also experienced some negative follower losses and feedback from consumers. But this effect is explained away by if your close competitors are all sort of jumping on the bandwagon, so to speak, then you may be hurt by that collective action.

Starting point is 00:12:22 Wait a minute. You found that if you did participate in Blackout Tuesday on Instagram, you were likely to have follower loss. But if you did not participate, you would also have follower loss? But only for a very specific set of brands whose close competitors are all participating. So it may be a sort of damned if you do, damned if you don't situation where, you know, I am almost forced to do so, to participate because my close competitors are doing it. And because of that, we all sort of suffer.

Starting point is 00:12:58 It's like a prisoner's dilemma, an equilibrium that's bad for all the participating brands. Now, that said, I think these decisions are not completely randomized. So if I choose not to participate, there might be a good reason why I choose not to participate, even though all my five or ten closest competitors are doing so. So this research, we're still trying to, you know, flesh out the details and trying to think about better causal inference strategies to get at the true causal impacts. But it is kind of an interesting thing to point out, right,

Starting point is 00:13:34 that brands might be put into a predicament because of how their competitors are behaving. And because of that collective action, it might end up, at least on some metrics like social media, following and engagement could hurt everybody involved. I appreciate you speculating on potential causes. I know it's uncomfortable for scientists to do that. My wife is a scientist. When we were dating, I asked her, she went to see a movie with a friend.

Starting point is 00:13:59 She came back. I asked her how the movie was. And instead of telling me her opinion, she asked me by what criteria I would like to know her opinion. So I understand the struggle. What surprised you the most about your findings? I was just surprised that, you know, there was a negative impact at all. I think academics and I live in a large city in Philadelphia, and everyone around me is sort of leaning liberal. And it seemed like this was something that everyone just accepted, that brands should support this, everybody should support these causes. And I think you could make an argument that maybe it's a moral responsibility to support injustice anywhere. And so it seems strange to me that there would be this type of backlash.

Starting point is 00:14:53 But, you know, it is interesting once you see the data that, in fact, it exists and it reminds you that not everybody shares the belief of the people around you in your little bubble. So bottom line, in light of your findings, what should marketers do differently from this day forward? I'm guessing this is going to be more about having a track record of supporting a cause rather than just jumping on something in the news cycle. Yeah. So I think if you want to be positioning your brand in that way that we are pro-social, we support all of these racial justice causes, right, then you really need to do it. It needs to be part of your brand's DNA. It can't just be, you know, when it's in the news, I jump in. It has to be something that comes from an authentic place. I think this probably is very intuitive for, you know, the people who are supporting these causes.

Starting point is 00:15:46 And I think the brands should, you know, approach it that way as well. It's not sort of an opportunity to, you know, gain customers. It's an opportunity to demonstrate what your core values are. You had co-authors on your paper. Who were they? Yeah, so our co-authors, Marco, who's also an assistant professor at Temple, Marco Chin. We have Sheming Luo, who's a professor at Temple University. And we also have our PhD student, Eric. He was a second-year PhD student.

Starting point is 00:16:16 So this is a very nice thing to get a publication so early in his career. Well, Dr. Wang, it's fascinating research. I'm delighted you were able to share it with us. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your time. It's great to be on. Yang Wang is an assistant professor of marketing at the Fox School of Business at Temple University.

Starting point is 00:16:33 His paper was just published in the Journal of Marketing Science. It's called, How Support for Black Lives Matter Impacts Consumer Responses on Social Media. It's the season for new styles and you love to shop for jackets and boots. on social media. holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rakuten.ca. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal. Get the Rakuten app or join at rakuten.ca. R-A-K-U-T-E-N.C-A.

Today in Digital Marketing - Social Causes: When Good Deeds Go Bad

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