Effects of Information About Firms’ Ethical and Unethical Actions on Consumers’ Attitudes

Three experiments examined the manner in which consumers are influenced by information about firms’ ethical behaviors and product attribute information when forming attitudes toward the firm. Confirming principles drawn from evaluations of individuals, results showed that a superior product attribute enhances attitudes toward ethically behaving firms more than toward unethically behaving firms. Furthermore, consumers’ attitudes toward superior products differed depending on the type of ethical behavior enacted by the firm—whether refraining from unethical behavior or acting prosocially. However, when a product attribute was inferior, firms’ ethics had less impact.

[1]  Jonathan Baron,et al.  Social roles and the moral judgement of acts and omissions , 1996 .

[2]  P. Herr,et al.  Effects of Word-of-Mouth and Product-Attribute Information on Persuasion: An Accessibility-Diagnosticity Perspective , 1991 .

[3]  C. M. Riordan,et al.  Corporate Image: Employee Reactions and Implications for Managing Corporate Social Performance , 1997 .

[4]  Frederick D. Sturdivant,et al.  Consumer Responses to Socially Questionable Corporate Behavior: An Empirical Test , 1977 .

[5]  T. Shultz,et al.  Moral Rules: Their Content and Acquisition , 1990 .

[6]  Johny K. Johansson,et al.  Image Variables in Multi-Attribute Product Evaluations: Country-of-Origin Effects , 1984 .

[7]  John J. Skowronski,et al.  Social judgment and social memory: The role of cue diagnosticity in negativity, positivity, and extremity biases. , 1987 .

[8]  Oswald A. J. Mascarenhas.  Exonerating Unethical Marketing Executive Behaviors: A Diagnostic Framework , 1995 .

[9]  M. Brewer,et al.  A schematic model of dispositional attribution in interpersonal perception. , 1979 .

[10]  Donal E. Carlston,et al.  Negativity and extremity biases in impression formation: A review of explanations. , 1989 .

[11]  D. Hamilton,et al.  Perceiving persons and groups. , 1996, Psychological review.

[12]  G. Leventhal,et al.  The Distribution of Rewards and Resources in Groups and Organizations , 1976 .

[13]  Robert S. Wyer,et al.  Effects of Country-of-Origin and Product-Attribute Information on Product Evaluation: An Information Processing Perspective , 1989 .

[14]  J. Baron,et al.  Omission and commission in judgment and choice , 1991 .

[15]  M. Goldberg.  Social Marketing: Are We Fiddling While Rome Burns? , 1995 .

[16]  V. Folkes.  Recent Attribution Research in Consumer Behavior: A Review and New Directions , 1988 .

[17]  Terence A. Shrimp.  Academic appalachia and the discipline of consumer research , 1994 .

[18]  Peter A. Dacin,et al.  The Company and the Product: Corporate Associations and Consumer Product Responses , 1997 .