How to strategically frame advocacy in a polarized landscape

Corporate advocacy on social issues has never been more complex. As Meta and Amazon scale back their diversity initiatives and companies like Bud Light face intense backlash over LGBTQ+ outreach, businesses are grappling with a fundamental tension:

"How can we engage meaningfully on sociopolitical issues while navigating an increasingly polarized landscape?"

Our Page Center-funded research tackles two crucial questions that can provide guidance on how communication professionals can communicate companies’ messages about such sociopolitical issues in this volatile environment:

1. How can communication professionals frame advocacy messages?
2. Whose voices matter? In other words, who should be featured in advocacy messages?

To examine these questions, we conducted a series of online experiments across two high-profile, controversial social issues––racial justice and abortion rights––with 1,128 U.S. participants. We tested two types of message framing—gain framing vs. loss framing.

• Gain framing projected gain, or positive outcomes, for supporting the company’s side.
• Loss framing focused on the negative consequences of not joining the company’s side.

Each message also featured one of two types of endorsers—celebrity vs. employee.

We discovered that success lies in understanding how message framing and endorser choices work together in influencing audiences who had different identities through distinct psychological pathways. Here are our key findings:

The power of positivity vs. loss aversion

In general, we found that companies’ advocacy messages with gain framing were an effective strategy. Those messages made the participants feel positive, creating a more favorable perception of the company, as well as higher engagement with and likelihood of supporting the social issues in the messages.

However, the framing effects differed by which group the audience members belonged to. Notably, the messages that used loss framing directly increased African American audiences’ intentions to advocate for the issue. These results suggest that message framing needs to be crafted based on the characteristics of the target audience.

It’s not just who speaks, but how they’re seen

Choosing the right spokesperson for a CSA message isn’t always straightforward. It all comes down to how the audience views the person delivering the message.

Expertise was an important trait of a spokesperson, and different type of spokespersons can convey different forms of expertise. For race-related messages, a celebrity spokesperson was perceived as an expert source across various ethnic groups. For abortion rights messages, an employee spokesperson effectively demonstrated issue-specific knowledge, particularly resonating with female participants.

Our research also showed the power of employees. A company’s advocacy message that featured their employee’s voices helped the audience to form a sense of connection with the employee, which led to greater support for both the company and the issue. For certain groups, an employee spokesperson was perceived to be even more trustworthy than a celebrity––specifically among White American participants on the issue of racial justice.

Master your message framing

Frame your messages both to evoke positive emotions and to encourage thoughtful engagement: “Together, we can help create positive change in workplace equity. Here’s how our actions can create a measurable impact....” When communicating with impacted communities, incorporate loss frames that enhance your audience’s feelings of control and influence such as, “Without action now, we risk losing hard-won workplace protections and equal opportunities.”

Choose your spokesperson strategically

Employee endorsers show remarkable versatility. Engage your employees in social advocacy efforts and let them speak about it, following the Page Principle that you should “realize an enterprise’s true character is expressed by its people.” Have employees share personal stories and direct experiences. Their authentic perspectives demonstrate valuable ground-level expertise and reduce psychological distance from your audience. When featuring celebrities, leverage their broader expertise by having them speak to the bigger picture and long-term societal impact, which will improve attitudes toward your company and foster your audience’s advocacy intention.

The most effective CSA campaigns are those that strategically blend message framing and endorser selection to align with their target audiences.

• Use gain frames to activate emotional responses and deeper thinking.
• Use loss frames to empower directly impacted groups.
• Leverage both employee and celebrity endorsers at different campaign phases to maximize credibility and reach.
• Continuously monitor how messages influence emotions, cognitive processing, and audience connections with endorsers.

By applying these research-backed strategies, organizations can create corporate social advocacy messages and campaigns that not only drive business success but also advance meaningful social justice goals.

For more information about this study, email Shi at shiduli@nmsu.edu, Chen at chenf@cofc.edu and/or Sun Young Lee at sunlee@umd.edu. This project was supported by a 2023 Page/Johnson Legacy Scholar Grant from the Arthur W. Page Center.