Testing Publics’ Perceptions of Corporate Social Advocacy Messaging: Linking Organizational and Social Outcomes

ABSTRACT

Corporate social advocacy (CSA) refers to an organization taking a public stance on controversial social-political issues. Aiming at influencing individual attitudes towards hot-button issues and meeting the heightened public expectations for CSA, an increasing number of businesses are engaging in CSA initiatives. Therefore, it is critical to uncover how publics’ perceptions of CSA messages influence the effectiveness of strategic CSA communication on social outcomes. Moreover, when corporations risk alienating certain subgroups of publics, more research is needed to assess how publics’ perceptions of CSA messages affect organizational relationship building, and how such influence is contingent on individual differences pertaining to the focal political/social issues. An online survey with 530 responses supports a moderated mediation model of CSA messaging perceptions with organization-public relationships and issue advocacy behaviors as outcomes. Grounded in the persuasion knowledge model and elaboration likelihood model, this interdisciplinary study contributes to the broad understanding of the strategic CSA communication process by crystalizing the effectiveness of CSA message informativeness and factual message tone, uncovering the key mediating mechanism of CSA credibility, as well as establishing the individual factor of involvement recognition as a boundary condition for the CSA message strategies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).