The Socially Benevolent Underdog: How An Underdog Brand Status Inspires Consumers’ Charitable Donation And The Moderating Effect Of Attitude Toward Monetary Donation

This paper explores how businesses, especially small ones, can exercise their social responsibility by soliciting consumer charitable giving through communicating an underdog brand status. A controlled experiment supported our hypothesis that when an underdog brand status is communicated, which highlights its external disadvantages as well as its passion and determination to overcome all odds, it inspires consumers’ charitable donation. We further identified that consumer attitude toward helping others (a sub-dimension of attitude toward monetary donation) moderates the proposed effect. Our findings contribute to the prior literature by showing that an underdog brand status stimulates effects beyond consumer purchase. As such, underdog can be seen as a socially benevolent brand status. We suggest that social responsibility is not only a duty for giant corporations but that small businesses can also contribute. Despite facing resource limitations, small businesses can still leverage their seemingly inferior underdog status to promote consumer philanthropy.