Stepping out of the Shadows: Identity Exposure as a Remedy for Stigma Transfer Concerns in the Medical Marijuana Market

Abstract

Many legalized markets bear categorical stigma—a vilifying label attached to an industry and its participants—that threatens their performance and survival chances. This happens because audiences avoid engagement with stigmatized organizations to minimize the probability of stigma transfer. Although scholars have explored what strategies stigmatized companies undertake to mitigate their stigma, we know very little about whether and how audiences’ acceptance of stigmatized organizations actually happens and if industry-level processes play a role in this acceptance. We develop a theory of identity exposure predicting that customers will become less concerned about stigma transfer when stigmatized organizations unambiguously reveal their identities by publicly advocating and celebrating their business and when vanguard customers openly discuss stigmatized organizations and their products in public forums. We find support for our theorizing in the analyses of customers’ concerns about stigma in Weedmaps.com —a marijuana-based community—from its inception in 2008 through 2014. Ultimately, our findings and extensive robustness checks suggest that identity exposure within stigmatized industries can alleviate customers’ concerns about stigma transfer and in this way accelerate the market destigmatization process.

Fields of Gold: Scraping Web Data for Marketing Insights

“…Sociologists and organizational scholars, in turn, have already used web data to compile intriguing data sets from sources such as Weedmaps. Using these data, they examine, for example, how existing medical cannabis dispensaries have repositioned themselves after the entry of recreational dispensaries (Hsu, Kovács and Koçak 2019) or how consumers deal with potential stigma transfer (Khessina, Reis, and Cameron Verhaal 2021). By leveraging similar web data, marketing researchers could explore intriguing marketing questions.…”

Not on Skid Row: Stigma Management in Addiction Treatment Organizations

“…Indeed, extant research alludes to the ways in which, for example, customers benefit from bathhouses' attempts to hide or obscure their stigmatized core operations (Hudson and Okhuysen, 2009), as these stigma management tactics work not only to the organization's benefit but equally to keep customers' potentially stigmatizing identities out of the broader public's view. Likewise, campus kink associations' (Coslor et al, 2020) and marijuana dispensaries' (Khessina et al, 2021) unabashed and public discursive confrontation of stigmatizing perceptions has efficacy towards both organizational outcomes (e.g., increasing membership or patronage, recognition, and legitimacy) and individual benefits (e.g., normalizing individual sexual or recreational preferences, embeddedness in wider support networks).…”

Double Trouble: Containing Public Disapproval Arising from an Interplay of Stigmatized Categories

“…The notion of stigmatized categories refers to groups of organizations "whose liability prompts out-group members to keep their distance to avoid a potential harmful association" (Vergne, 2012(Vergne, , p. 1030. Thus far authors have empirically examined stigmatized categories that have included discredited industries or services, such as a gay bathhouse (Hudson and Okhuysen, 2009) and mixed martial arts (Helms and Patterson, 2014); products such as alcohol (Barlow et al, 2018) and genetically modified crops (Ellen and Bone, 2008); and markets such as armaments (Vergne, 2012), nuclear power (Piazza and Perretti, 2015), medical cannabis (Khessina et al, 2021;Lashley and Pollock, 2020), and E-cigarette (Hsu and Grodal, 2021).…”