Tod speaks with the co-author of a scientific study that questions whether supporting a popular social causes is always a guaranteed win for your brand.
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.”
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Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada.
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[00:00:00] Hello friends, it's Todd and I am currently out of the country on vacation.
[00:00:04] I'll be back Thursday, February 29th.
[00:00:07] So instead of a regular newscast type show, please enjoy this deep dive interview.
[00:00:13] Make sure your brand is supporting some social causes and talk about that support on your
[00:00:17] social media.
[00:00:19] Doing so is basically a free pass to better brand perception, right?
[00:00:24] Take the recent Black Lives Matter movement.
[00:00:26] Did your brand donate? So if you're listening to 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
[00:01:42] it was mostly isolated to Instagram and a far as the social media backlash goes, is sort of isolated to instances where lots of other
[00:03:02] brands are also simultaneously supporting BLM. So in the case 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
[00:04:21] brands that historically posted things that were supporting
[00:05:27] If you practice slacktivism, so you support BLM but don't say anything about donating, then the effects are backfiring.
[00:05:29] They become negative.
[00:05:30] But if you are a Republican brand and you practice slacktivism, we find that the effects
[00:05:35] are actually neutral to maybe slightly positive, which is very interesting.
[00:05:40] I think we don't go into the exact mechanisms.
[00:05:46] We don't have evidence of this. founder, the CEO of the Goya Beans company basically went on 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,
[00:07:00] but actually the opposite of that 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. Based on our research, if you are just looking career where the opportunities are as vast as our nation, where it's not about mission statements, but a shared mission? At U.S. Customs and Border Protection, we go beyond to protect more than borders, from ship to shore, air to ground, cities to local communities. CBP agents and officers are keeping people safe.
[00:09:41] Join U.S. Customs and Border Protection and go beyond for something far greater than yourself.
[00:09:46] Learn more at cbp.gov slash careers. 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 our data show. So I would say 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
[00:12:20] and because of that we all sort of suffered. It wife is a scientist. When we were dating, I asked her, she went to see a movie with a friend. 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? Yeah, so I think if you want to be positioned your brand in that way that we are pro-social, we support all of these racial justice causes, then you really need to do, it needs to be part of your brand's DNA. It can't just be when it's in the news,
[00:15:00] I jump in, it has to be something
[00:15:03] that comes from an authentic place.
[00:15:05] I think this probably is very intuitive In the Journal of Marketing Science, it's called, how support for Black Lives Matter impacts consumer responses on social media. Every day we rise, challenging ourselves to work for what we believe in. At U.S. Border Patrol, protecting our borders is more than a job, it's a calling.