Impact of Global Brand Chief Marketing Officers’ Corporate Social Responsibility and Sociopolitical Activism Communication on Twitter

Abstract

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) engage with their stakeholders on social media platforms to create a digital impact. CMO communication on societal issues is understudied despite heightened global attention to brands’ social practices. This poses three research questions: (1) How central is corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sociopolitical activism in the communication of global brands’ CMOs?, (2) Does CMOs’ communication about CSR or sociopolitical activism have a digital impact?, and (3) How do brand origin (i.e., geographic location of headquarters) and CMO nationality (U.S. vs. non-U.S.) moderate the CSR/sociopolitical activism–digital communication impact? Drawing on expectancy violation theory, this research (Ntweets = 17,468 over NCMOs = 81) finds that CMOs rarely publish CSR or sociopolitical activism communication on Twitter (5.3% and 3.2%) and demonstrates a higher digital impact of retweets for CSR and a lower impact for sociopolitical activism tweets than regular communication. Furthermore, non-U.S. headquarters and CMO nationality strengthen the positive effect of CSR communication and weaken the negative effect of sociopolitical activism communication.