Research in Progress: Developing an audience-centric framework of corporate social advocacy strategy

By Jiun-Yi Tsai, Northern Arizona University, Ioana A. Coman, Texas Tech University, and Shupei Yuan, Northern Illinois University

In an age when most Americans feel deep political and ideological division, it is no exception whether the public thinks it is important for corporations to advocate controversial issues.

According to a 2020 Pew Research survey, 52 percent of U.S. adults increasingly demand corporations to take a stance on hot-button issues, while 48 percent consider companies’ neutral or no stances as acceptable.

In light of the divisive political climate and polarized opinions on corporate social advocacy (CSA) campaigns or corporate political activism (CPA), public relations scholars have paid close attention to the underpinning motivation of companies’ CSA efforts.

Existing research has revealed the positive impacts of CSA on consumer attitudinal and behavioral outcomes. While engaging in CSA or CPA might be beneficial, companies’ public support for or opposition to controversial sociopolitical issues is still seen as risky business that corporate leaders balance between financial outcomes and social activism.

Therefore, we start to ponder several unanswered questions:

• What types of issues (if any) do audiences expect a company to take a stance on?
• What strategies are expected and accepted by audiences, and at which point (if ever) is it too much?
• What are the arguments given by audiences for their expectations of companies’ involvement/non-involvement in these issues?

To satisfy our curiosity, we conducted a pilot survey of college students enrolled in a public southern university during November and December 2020. Our preliminary results found two dimensions underlying audience expectations of companies’ engagement in eight salient contested sociopolitical issues: basic needs and human rights. Participants expected corporations to support racial justice and human rights more than essential health and safety needs.

Moreover, we asked participants to elaborate on why they think companies should (or not) take a stance on the aforementioned issues and recall their favorite brands’ CSA actions. Iterative thematic analysis of qualitative responses yielded two powerful insights: perception of personal-societal control and the attribution of companies’ treatment responsibility to create social change on given issues by changing public attitudes and behaviors. The promising findings highlight a need to bring in attribution theory to understand the psychological processes underlying how companies’ engagement in social and political advocacy is congruent with consumer expectations.

Our next steps are to develop an audience-centric framework to guide practical decisions for CSA approaches. Theoretically, we will chart a new path forward by integrating attribution theory to understand the psychological processes underlying how companies’ engagement in social and political advocacy is congruent with consumer expectations. We will establish associations among audience characteristics, personal control perceptions, treatment attributions, and expected corporate advocacy strategies. We consider how perceived reputation and the issue cycle interact with individual-level variables.

We will investigate how distinct companies’ change strategies are associated with anticipated influences. Taking an innovative mixed-methods design, we will test the proposed framework by conducting a nationally representative survey of U.S. adults and soliciting feedback from qualitative focus groups.

For further information on this study, contact Tsai at jiun-yi.tsai@nau.edu, Coman at ioana.coman@ttu.edu; or Shupei Yuan at syuan@niu.edu. This project is supported by a 2021 Page/Johnson Legacy Scholar Grant from the Arthur W. Page Center.