Examining native CSR advertising as a post-crisis response strategy

Abstract

Although companies have started to adopt native CSR advertising for crisis communication, no existing research has examined this new phenomenon. To fill the gap, this study tested how crisis type and ad identification influence the effectiveness of native CSR advertising as a post-crisis response strategy. An online experiment was conducted using a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults. The results indicated that perceived manipulativeness was the underlying mechanism of how ad identification impaired consumer responses. Crisis type affected advertising effectiveness through consumers’ attributions of crisis responsibility and values-driven CSR motive. More importantly, ad identification significantly impaired consumers’ attitudes toward a native CSR advertisement and their intention to share the advertisement in the victim crisis condition, but not in the accidental or intentional crisis condition. These findings provide meaningful contributions to both the research and practice of CSR advertising.

Keywords:

• Native CSR advertising
• post-crisis communication
• crisis type
• ad identification
• perceived manipulativeness
• perceived crisis responsibility
• values-driven motive
• motivation attribution

Acknowledgement

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Pennsylvania State University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A one-way ANOVA test was conducted with crisis type being the independent variable and perceived crisis responsibility being the dependent variable. The results indicated that crisis type had a significant effect on perceived crisis responsibility, F(2, 396) = 136.05, p = .000, ŋ_p²= 0.41. Post hoc analyses indicated that the victim crisis (M = 3.62, SD = 2.16) elicited less perceived responsibility than the accidental crisis (M = 6.20, SD = 0.97, p = .000) and the intentional crisis (M = 6.19, SD = 0.96, p = .000). However, there was no difference between accidental crisis and intentional crisis on perceived responsibility, p > .05.

Additional information

Funding

This project was supported by a Page Legacy Scholar Grant (No. 2018OC002) from the Arthur W. Page Center at The Pennsylvania State University’s College of Communications.

Notes on contributors

Linwan Wu

Linwan Wu (Ph.D., University of Florida) is currently an Assistant Professor in School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina.

Holly Overton

Holly Overton (Ph.D., The Pennsylvania State University) is currently an Associate Professor in School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of South Carolina.