Hybrid Strategy—Interference or Integration? How Corporate Communication Impacts Consumers’ Memory and Company Evaluation

ABSTRACT

This study investigates whether hybrid strategy would be more effective than corporate social responsibility (CSR) strategy in boosting CSR information recall and company evaluation. Informed by the corporate ability (CA)-CSR-hybrid communication strategy typology, the associative network theory, and memory interference and integration literature, this study conducted a 2 (prior corporate associations) × 2 (subsequent corporate communication strategies) between-subjects experiment. Findings showed that hybrid (vs. CSR) strategy was more effective in generating CSR information recall when a company had previously established CA associations but did not outperform CSR strategy when the company had no previous CA associations.

Notes

¹ This study focuses on examining the role of proactive interference out of the practical need that companies typically try to introduce a new type of associations after one type of associations is established. It is common for companies with established CA associations to incorporate more CSR communication strategies to further cultivate relationships with stakeholders. This can be evidenced by Kim and Rader’s (2010) findings that the top 100 of Fortune 500 companies (ranked by total revenue, a financial indicator of CA) tend to use CSR strategy more often than the rest of the 400 companies.

² The average age of the participants in each condition was (1) 34.06 (SD = 10.29) for absence of prior CA associations + subsequent CSR strategy; (2) 36.03 (SD = 10.50) for absence of prior CA associations + subsequent hybrid strategy; (3) 30.33 (SD = 5.94) for presence of prior CA associations + subsequent CSR strategy; (4) 32.63 (SD = 8.54) for presence of prior CA associations + subsequent hybrid strategy. Results from a one-way ANOVA test showed that the age means were not significantly different across the four conditions, F(3, 133) = 2.50, p = .063. Therefore, we ruled out age differences as a potential confound, considering that extant literature suggested that age differences were associated with differences in memory integration (Brown & Maylor, 2017; Old & Naveh-Benjamin, 2008).

³ Instead of giving participants in the control condition no information, this study asked them to read about an irrelevant company. This was done to eliminate potential confounds brought by unequal information volume and cognitive load across conditions.

⁴ The distraction task in Phase 3 and the free recall task in Phase 1 were designed in a way that they followed the experimental design paradigm of memory interference research (e.g., Blankenship & Whitely, 1941; Burke & Srull, 1988).

⁵ For example, similar to the effect predicted in our study, when consumers have no prior CSR associations with a firm, a subsequent CA strategy might work better than a subsequent hybrid strategy, because the hybrid message is likely to pose concurrent interference. However, if the potential transferring effect of CSR associations is verified, different from the effect predicted in our study, a hybrid strategy and a single CA strategy might work equally well when consumers have established prior CSR associations with the firm. This is because consumers with prior CSR associations may have also inferred CA associations before exposure to subsequent communication messages. In this regard, prior CSR associations may serve as integration in processing both the hybrid and the single CA message.