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This study examined how consumer response to corporations that take a stand (or not) on social/political issues – varied by “fit” between the company and the advocated issue – was mediated by perceptions of the motives for the advocacy.

A 2 (corporate stand: stand v. no stand) × 2 (company-issue fit: high v. low) experiment was conducted with a nationally representative sample of 1,204 U.S. adult consumers.

The study found that the effect of corporate stand taking on perceived corporate hypocrisy was moderated by company-issue fit. Also, companies were viewed as more hypocritical when taking a stand on an issue that was less relevant to the company’s business, despite the CSA being seen as being values-driven.

The study provides guidelines for companies to determine when and whether to take a stand on a CSA issue. Particularly, the results suggest that values promotion is not the sole determinant of successful CSA and that company-issue fit should be taken into account for a more comprehensive assessment of the given CSA.

The purpose of this paper is to examine Millennial consumers’ responses to two corporate social initiative types – socially responsible business practices and corporate philanthropy – in combination with proactive and reactive CSR communication strategies.

A 2 (corporate philanthropy/socially responsible business practices) ×2 (proactive/reactive CSR communication) between-subjects experiment was conducted.

The socially responsible business practices were largely perceived more positively than the philanthropic initiatives. Likewise, greater public-serving motives were attributed to the socially responsible business practices compared to the philanthropy. While philanthropic initiatives were perceived more negatively when communicated reactively, there were no significant differences between proactive and reactive socially responsible business practices.

As an attempt to initiate the comparative examination of the effects of different corporate social initiative types, this study suggests outperformance of the socially responsible business practices type of corporate social initiatives over the resources-giving (i.e. philanthropy) type of initiatives even in the reactive communication setting where reputational threat resides.