Navigating moral markets: How strategic sensegiving and category membership shape media sentiment following acquisitions in the US food processing industry

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We explore how firms navigate evolving moral markets’ fuzzy boundaries by employing sensegiving to address interpretive uncertainty following their strategic actions. We specifically consider how acquirers’ acquisition announcements and post-acquisition communications influence media positivity about the acquirer in the food processing industry’s natural, organic, and healthy moral market, contingent on the target’s category membership and acquirer/target category incongruence. We find that using more natural, organic, and healthy language enhances media positivity when the target straddles or is fully part of the natural, organic, and healthy category, announcing the target will retain its autonomy enhances media positivity regardless of the target’s category membership, and extreme misfits negatively influence media tenor, whereas misfits clarifying the acquirer’s commitment to the moral market moderate the sensegiving activities’ effects. We contribute to the moral markets literature by showing how firms sensegive to position themselves within evolving moral markets and to the categories literature by considering how firms navigate a moral market’s fuzzy and potentially shifting boundaries in ways that reduce interpretive uncertainty.