Lending a Hand to the Competitor: How Brand-to-Brand Help on Social Media Affects Consumer Evaluations

Abstract

Brand-to-brand help on social media is an unexplored branding strategy and a novel corporate social responsibility (CSR) behavior. The research is based on the framework of communion and agency, which has been used to interpret person-to-person help in the context of social psychology and has also been applied to the domain of brands. Across a qualitative study and four experiments the authors demonstrate that compared with conventional self-promoting advertising, such brand-to-brand help conveys signals of high communion and agency, which in turn lead to enhanced brand outcomes. In considering the agentic nature of a for-profit brand that might cause consumer skepticism toward advertising and CSR, the research identifies consumer skepticism as a theoretically relevant moderator, showing that the helping behavior has a stronger positive impact on consumers with higher skepticism. In contrast to the prior work limited to the consequences of perceived communion and agency, the research investigates their drivers for brands. Meanwhile, the authors find that the helping strategy is effective irrespective of the situation and the size of the recipient brand.