Measuring the persuasive power of consumerist activism: An experimental study on the Polity model applied to food imitating products

Abstract

Set in the field of consumer activism movements, this article investigates criticisms addressed to firms whose practices (in our case, food imitating product practices) are judged as irresponsible. It reveals that different approaches to structuring criticisms lead to different persuasive effects on consumers’ attitudes towards the incriminated firm. We first argue that both persuasion and justification issues underpinning militant criticism can be grasped through Boltanski and Thévenot’s ‘polity model’ (1991). Second, we report the results of an experiment that explores the impact of the structure of activists’ discourse structure (quality and logic of argumentation, message sidedness) on both the acceptance of critiques and on consumers’ declared behavioral intentions to boycott respectively the product and the brand. Using these results, we suggest an optimal militant critiques frame from which we outline managerial implications for firms targeted by consumerist activist groups.