Constituency building: Determining consumers’ willingness to participate in corporate political activities

Clark D. Johnson, Brittney C. Bauer and Brad D. Carlson

International Journal of Research in Marketing, 2022, vol. 39, issue 1, 42-57

Abstract: Recently, firms have increasingly approached their own customers for assistance with corporate political activities—a strategy known as constituency building. While constituency building efforts targeting shareholders and employees have been well-studied, relatively little is known about the impact of approaching consumers. Hence, this paper examines why consumers participate in corporate political activities on behalf of a brand, and we present three studies to explore this increasingly popular practice. First, Study 1 utilizes qualitative interviews with actual campaign participants to provide initial insights to develop our theoretical model, which we subsequently test in two experiments. Study 2 finds that brand loyalty is a key driver of consumer activism, with both direct and indirect effects through its impact on issue salience, information seeking behavior, and its interaction with the issue type. Finally, Study 3 finds that consumer activism is associated with increased brand loyalty, indicating that this may be a relationship building activity and an important dimension of the longer process of social exchange between the brand and consumer.

Keywords: Constituency building; Corporate political activity; Consumer activism; Nonmarket strategy; Brand loyalty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167811621000471
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ijrema:v:39:y:2022:i:1:p:42-57

DOI: 10.1016/j.ijresmar.2021.06.004

Access Statistics for this article

International Journal of Research in Marketing is currently edited by Roland Rust

More articles in International Journal of Research in Marketing from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().