Speedy activists: How firm response time to sociopolitical events influences consumer behavior

Abstract

Organizations face growing pressure from their consumers and stakeholders to take public stances on sociopolitical issues. However, many are hesitant to do so lest they make missteps, promises they cannot keep, appear inauthentic, or alienate consumers, employees, or other stakeholders. Here we investigate consumers' impressions of firms that respond quickly or slowly to sociopolitical events. Using data scraped from Instagram and three online experiments (N = 2452), we find that consumers express more positive sentiment and greater purchasing intentions toward firms that react more quickly to sociopolitical issues. Unlike other types of public firm decision making such as product launch, where careful deliberation can be appreciated, consumers treat firm response time to sociopolitical events as an informative cue of the firm's authentic commitment to the issue. We identify an important boundary condition of this main effect: speedy responses bring limited benefits when the issue is highly divisive along political lines. Our findings bridge extant research on brand activism and communication, and offer practical advice for firms.

Consumer insights from text analysis

“…Further, we observe no clear correlation between the use of field data and more sophisticated natural language processing (NLP) methods among the special issue articles: using archival field data does not necessarily require advanced methods. Special issue articles used methods that ranged from relatively straightforward applications of easy‐to‐use sentiment analysis and dictionaries (e.g., Nam et al, 2023; Wan et al, 2023) to more complex methods like grammar dependency parsing or deep learning neural network approaches (e.g., Park et al, 2023). Such methods are applied when doing so help solve specific research challenges, such as the difficulty of accurately measuring passive voice (Sepehri et al, 2023) or subjectivity in language (Park et al, 2023).…”