Perceived Sincerity of Motives

What it is

Their result is unusually precise about the sign changing. Corporate social responsibility activities improve a company's image when consumers attribute sincere motives, are ineffective when sincerity of motives is ambiguous, and hurt the company's image when motives are perceived as insincere. The variables that shift the reading are the benefit salience of the cause, the source through which consumers learn about the activity, and the ratio of contributions to the advertising that features them. High benefit salience hurts the company, particularly where consumers learn about it from a company source, and the remedy the authors identify is spending more on the activity than on advertising it.

In effect

That last clause is the directly load-bearing one for any firm told to lead with its purpose, because leading with it means a company source and high benefit salience together, which is the combination their experiments found damaging. It also sits beside a related but separate mechanism, the inference that a deliberate social benefit must have cost product quality, which does not require the consumer to doubt sincerity at all. The two can be told apart by what the consumer is suspicious of, the firm's honesty in the first case and its budget in the second.

What it does not say

It does not come with magnitudes. The abstract names no sample sizes and no effect sizes, the paper is closed, and none is printed here. It is not a finding about whether any firm's motives are in fact sincere, only about how a reading of them changes the outcome. And the received wisdom it sits inside has since been dented from an unexpected direction: the largest meta-analysis of this literature found no moderation by whether the industry was a controversial one, called that an interesting finding because it contradicts existing research on the topic, and named this paper among the works it contradicts. Both belong on the page.

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