Share these talks and lectures with your colleagues
Invite colleaguesResearch paper
Audience response to brand activism: An alignment evaluation framework
Journal of Brand Strategy,
13
(1),
42-56
(2024)
Abstract
Evolving from emerging expectations of brands to take action on societal issues, a comprehensive framework is introduced for advertising account planners to evaluate how well a brand’s activism initiative aligns with the cultural and social issues of its audience. Contextualised within brand activism alignment literature, the current research investigates audience responses to Bud Light’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Using topic modelling, textual analysis and discussion, the proposed framework is evaluated for its ability to help guide advertisers while also mitigating risk in brand activism endeavours. The findings are discussed in relation to four potential scenarios that advertising strategists may use to navigate brand activism choices. Natural language processing methods are employed as a research strategy to shed light on the potential for a mismatch between Bud Light’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney and their audience. This paper describes how framework proposes research questions to understand the main message and benefit of a tactic to a brand’s target audience, as well as how the audience’s response may be seen online using the concept of affordances in social media.
Keywords: brand activism; marketing framework; Bud Light; audience response
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
Kristen L. Sussman (PhD, University of Texas at Austin) leverages her expertise in native and third-party social media platforms to connect, monitor and assess consumer behaviours. Her research focuses on the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) and aims to uncover the relationship between advancements in generative AI and media effects, consumer behaviour and social network engagement. Using a combination of language analysis and behavioural trace data, Kristen applies social science methods in the domain of computational advertising to investigate advertising processing and explore the effects of different social and psychological framing techniques. Her expertise has contributed to research areas of emotion and media use, technology adoption, health communication and understanding underserved populations.
Joann Sciarrino is former director and Isabella Cunningham Chair in Advertising in the Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations. Sciarrino is an advertising and marketing practitioner and scholar with research interests in digital marketing, analytics and brand attachment. Prior to joining the University of Texas at Austin, she was the Knight Chair in Digital Advertising and Marketing at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Media and Journalism, where she taught courses in digital marketing and market intelligence to undergraduate students. Sciarrino also taught digital marketing to MBA students in the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. In 2016, she received the University of North Carolina Tanner Award, which recognises excellence in inspirational teaching. Prior to academia, Sciarrino served as executive vice president for BBDO North America for 12 years, where she provided research, analytics and modelling solutions for more than 30 global brands, including AT&T, Starbucks, Hyatt, FedEx and L’Oreal.
Gary B. Wilcox (PhD, Michigan State University) is the John A. Beck Centennial Professor in Communication in the Stan Richards School of Advertising and Public Relations. He is also an associated faculty in the Nelson Center for Brand and Demand Analytics and the Center for Health Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr Wilcox holds a PhD from Michigan State University and two degrees from the University of Texas at Austin. His recent research interests include unstructured data analysis, social media analytic models and advertising’s impact on alcohol products and brands.
Laura F. Bright (PhD, The University of Texas at Austin) is Associate Director and Associate Professor of Media Analytics in the School of Advertising and Public Relations in the Moody College of Communication. Laura’s research focuses on understanding consumer behaviour within social media feeds — specifically related to privacy, digital well-being and data analytics. Her work has appeared in the top journals in her field and is frequently presented at academic conferences. In the classroom, Laura delivers content in the areas of media management and advertising research methods. Her industry experience includes working for Disney-funded media effects lab, surviving the early 2000s dot-com boom and bust in Austin, and running a family consulting business. For more information, please visit www.brightwoman.com.
