Rejoinder: Heterogeneous Impact of Brands’ Support for Black Lives Matter on Consumer Responses

Rejoinder in Response to the Commentary by Thomas and Chintagunta (2022) . We discuss three main lines of comments on our paper: internal validity of the research given consumers’ potential misunderstanding of Black Lives Matter (BLM), challenges to the causal inference strategy, and interpretations of our results. We address them with additional robustness checks and reaffirm our view of the original findings as offering a panel of evidence with a consistent storyline: brands’ support for BLM on social media induces, on average, a sizable negative effect on consumer responses. Whereas the commentary focuses on the average effect of BLM treatment, we highlight that the negative effect is highly heterogenous and can be mitigated when brands’ BLM support is directed at Democratic consumers and delivered in a context where their BLM support can be interpreted as more authentic (e.g., no bandwagon, self-promotion, or cheap talk; consistent history of prosociality; and aligned brand prosocial mission). Furthermore, we want to emphasize the nascent nature of research on BLM and social justice movements for marketing, and our work represents a first empirical deep dive into the nature of consumer responses to the branded support of the BLM movement on social media. It is our hope that this research and the accompanying commentaries can inspire a wealth of new marketing perspectives on this critically important topic. History: K. Sudhir served as the senior editor for this article.