Brand Activism: Exploring Understudied Relationships and Contexts
(A2025-124676)

AUTHORS

Amir Grinstein, Northeastern University; Anna Stepanova, University of Groningen; Shira Barzel, Ben Gurion University of the Negev; Jesse D’Agostino, Northwestern University; Velmurugan PALANICHAMY, Grenoble Ecole de Management; Elvira Ferrer-Bernal, Universidad de Murcia

ABSTRACT

This special session aims to shed light on understudied aspects of brand activism – a topic of growing interest to marketing scholars, marketers and policy makers – with three advanced research projects and two early-stage ones. It specifically aims to explore understudied relationships and contexts. The first advanced project (Scalco et al.) is focusing on brand activism in a B2B context. This is a novel perspective given most studies in the field have adopted a B2C lens. Specifically, the authors ask how does the supplier’s engagement in activism influence contract implementation within interorganizational relationships. The second advanced project (Barzel and Riemer) takes brand activism to the world of sports – a meaningful and understudied arena – and wonders what happens when players from people’s favorite sports teams express opinions supporting enemies in political conflicts and what is an effective response from the team’s management. The third advanced project (D’Agostino et al.) creatively connects consumer emotion to activistic brands’ ability to predict consumer reactions. Specifically, they explore how consumers predisposed to form and express negative (vs. positive) emotion-based attitudes are likely to respond and how quickly. The first flash talk (Palanichamy and Schweitzer) goes beyond the traditional liberals vs. conservatives distinction, and studies how supporting brand activism differs across different type of liberal consumers – especially when liberals are part of the majority in the society and the activism is advancing minority groups. The second flash talk (Ferrer-Bernal et al.) highlights the reality that social media users are often exposed to a lot of disagreement around brand activism, although some of the disagreement is actually civil. The authors explore conditions under which a (civil) disagreement in the context of brand activism can actually be useful for the brand and the controversial cause it promotes.