Corporate social advocacy and gender equality: how call-to-action messages influence corporate reputation

Abstract

PurposeCorporations are confronted with growing demands to take a stand on socio-political issues, i.e. corporate social advocacy (CSA), which affects their reputation in the public. Companies use different CSA message strategies, including calling the public to support and act on the issue they advocate. Using reactance theory, the authors investigate the impact of CSA messages with a call to action on corporate reputation in the case of a company's gender equality initiative.Design/methodology/approachA one-factorial (CSA message with or without a call to action) between-subjects experiment was conducted by surveying 172 individuals living in Switzerland. The CSA messages were created in the context of gender equality.FindingsThe authors' study indicates that CSA messages with a call to action compared to those without overall harmed corporate reputation due to individuals' reactance, which is higher for CSA messages with a call to action, negatively affecting corporate reputation. The impact of the CSA message strategy with a call to action on corporate reputation remains significant after controlling for issue alignment and political leaning.Originality/valueCommunicating about socio-political issues, especially taking a stand, is a significant challenge for corporations in an increasingly polarized society and has often led to backlash, boycotts and damage to corporate reputation. This study shows that the possible adverse effects of advocating for socio-political issues can be related to reactance. It emphasizes that companies advocating for contested issues must be more cautious about the message strategy than the issue itself.

Editorial 29.2: Inclusivity and innovation

“…In the past three years, CCIJ has increased the publication of EDI/DEI topics by publishing works in a wider area of equality such as gender quotas (Lefley and Janecek, 2023, Hamplová et al , 2022), female journalists and their leadership experiences (Cunha and Lúcio Martins, 2023), female empowerment and internal communication (Li et al ., 2023), gender and the office culture (Polić and Holy, 2021; Tripathi et al ., 2023), femvertising (Lima and Casais, 2021), gender and leadership (Zeler et al ., 2022; Zheng et al ., 2023, Meng and Neill, 2023), CSA and gender equality (Marschlich and Bernet, 2024), JEDI issues and media irresponsibility (Painter and Sahm, 2023), CSR and gender (Painter et al ., 2022), and these are just articles published during my editorship and excluding some special issue articles. Therefore, CCIJ is emerging as a journal that increasingly publishes equality scholarship in corporate communication, contributing towards knowledge creation in this field as well as widening participation and bringing inclusivity to scholarship by opening doors to equality scholars in corporate communication.…”