The Minority Ownership Awareness Effect: When Promoting Minority Ownership Increases Brand Evaluations

Abstract

Recent social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, have prompted brands and retailers to increase the use of minority ownership labels (e.g., Black-owned, woman-owned). The current research examines when and why minority ownership awareness influences consumer behavior, particularly for brand failures. When a brand failure occurs, minority ownership awareness can result in higher brand evaluations and greater willingness to pay, a phenomenon referred to as the minority ownership awareness effect. This effect and its boundary conditions are demonstrated through five experiments and analyses of over 27,000 Google reviews for Black-owned restaurants. The authors propose that minority ownership awareness invokes a type of underdog effect, which is pronounced in situations involving product (vs. moral) failures, among people with low (vs. high) social dominance orientation, and among those people with a high (vs. low) internal motivation to respond without prejudice.