The day comes to an end. Tired of abiding to the rules of productivity you sit back, relax and prepare yourself for some hours of dolce fare niente on your social network of choice – you log into Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and are now ready to catch up with your friends, acquaintances, family et al. An advertisement for something vaguely familiar steals your attention. And then another one. You install AdBlock but still are bombarded with friendly requests to vote on some contest which requires you to like some company's page in order to proceed, or with delicious instafood from the fast food chain down your street. Oh wait, what is this? ‘23 surprising ways M&M's make your sex life better’? What fresh hell is this? Why do you find yourself unable to relax, exhausted from all the stimulus, feeling pushed from one hyperlink to the other as if a sudden gush of digital wind unearthed you from the comfort of your sofa?
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Today, consumers expect companies to be socially responsible. However, the literature is undecided about the effects of communicating one's corporate social responsibility activities to consumers. This raises the question of how sustainability-driven companies can best advertise their products to stimulate ethical consumption: using self-benefit frames, where the main beneficiary is the consumer, or using other-benefit frames, where the main beneficiary is a third party. Using three experiments, this study examines the effect of other-benefit (vs. self-benefit) advertising frames on consumers' impulse purchases from sustainability-driven companies. Increasing impulse purchases can help such companies to strengthen their competitive positions. Additionally, it is studied to what extent two types of justification (moral versus deservingness) explain the proposed effect of advertising frames. The results show that only other-benefit frames affect impulse buying behavior, both directly, as mediated by moral justification. This study's insights may help sustainability-driven companies to decide on their advertising strategies by providing evidence that other-benefit-framed advertisements are more effective in enhancing impulse purchases than self-benefit-framed advertisements.
Corporate reputation is becoming increasingly important for firms; social media platforms such as Twitter are used to convey their message. In this paper, corporate reputation will be assessed from a sustainability perspective. Using sentiment analysis, the top 100 brands of the Netherlands were scraped and analyzed. The companies were registered in the sustainable industry classification system (SICS) to perform the analysis on an industry level. A semantic search tool called Open Semantic Desktop Search was used to filter through the data to find keywords related to sustainability and corporate reputation. Findings show that companies that tweet more often about corporate reputation and sustainability receive overall a more positive sentiment from the public.
