How Does Corporate Social Responsibility Moderate the Adverse Effects of Product Failure in Social Media?
研究企业社会责任如何缓解产品失败对社交媒体推文情感的负面影响，进而促进销售增长，基于汽车行业数据发现高CSR企业获得更多正面推文，且推文情感每提升10%带动季度销售增长0.43%。
Synopsis The research problem This paper investigates how corporate social responsibility (CSR) moderates the adverse effect of product failure on promoting tweeting about a firm’s products, which subsequently affects sales growth. Motivation or theoretical reasoning Under the social contract theory, high-CSR-performance firms gain social approval and acceptance as they are perceived to have fulfilled their obligations and met society’s expectations. Society is more forgiving to these firms when they are involved in negative events such as product failure. The test hypotheses We hypothesized that firms’ CSR performance moderates the negative effect of product failure on tweet sentiment and that the increase in tweet sentiment leads to higher future sales growth. Target population We focused on the automotive industry due to its vast consumer base. We sampled all 16 car manufacturers that operate in the US. Adopted methodology Using aspect-based sentiment analysis, we identified 302,718 tweets from Twitter about the quality of cars and extracted the tweet sentiment. We used the car recall records to proxy for product failure. Analyses Multivariate regressions were used to test our hypotheses. Findings We found that firms’ CSR mitigates the negative effect of product failure on tweet sentiment about product quality and, subsequently, promotes sales growth. Our findings show that firms with strong CSR received significantly more net positive tweets than did those with weak CSR. Moreover, a 10% increase in net positive tweets was associated with a 0.43% increase in quarterly sales growth ([Formula: see text]). Of the three CSR types, governance CSR exerted the strongest effect on tweet sentiment and environmental CSR the second, while social CSR ranked the third. This paper extends the literature by investigating the effect of CSR on sales growth by altering social media tweeting.