The influence of gender stereotyping and issue advocacy on consumer sentiment

PurposeThis study explores the effect of gender stereotyping and issue advocacy on consumer sentiment toward advertising and brands.Design/methodology/approachDrawing from the literature, the study hypothesizes about the impact of gender stereotyping and consumer advocacy on consumer sentiment. A behavioral experiment tests the hypotheses and provides support for the main conclusions.FindingsResults indicate that issue advocacy can cancel the negative effect of traditional female stereotyping. The results also show that demographics are not necessarily the reason why a person favors or condemns stereotyping and advertising; on the contrary, any reaction is far more linked to personal disposition.Practical implicationsThe findings of this research have implications for marketing and advertising practice. While the use of issue advocacy is currently trending up, there is still a lack of understanding about its effect on consumers. Gender stereotyping is also being frequently used, but has caused huge backlashes in recent ad campaigns. Marketing and advertising managers can use insights from this research to shape advertising messages that use these two stimuli in order to enable a brand to better connect with its audience and achieve a more desirable outcome.Originality/valueThe paper contributes to the academic discussion about the effectiveness of using gender stereotyping and issue advocacy to drive advertising outcomes. It challenges the idea that the combination of these two advertising approaches is either detrimental or beneficial to the brand.

US Parties Abroad: Partisan Mobilising in a Federal Context

In the early 2000s, some observers predicted that the US parties’ overseas association would play an increasing role in US politics (Dark 2003). Changes since then, including the growth of the expatriate population, would seem to make such developments more likely. Yet many features of the US political system mitigate against party efforts to mobilise expatriate supporters, including single-member district elections and candidate-centred contests (Van Haute and Kernalegenn, 2020). What, then, has been the 21st century trajectory of US party abroad activity? This article investigates this question, comparing the recent evolution Democrat and Republican party abroad efforts. It shows that the parties have taken different paths, with the Democrats’ organisation focussing more on electoral mobilisation, while the Republicans’ organisation has focussed more on issue advocacy and non-electoral representation. These different operational modes reflect the opportunities for, and constraints on, mobilising US expatriates for partisan purposes.

Does Celebrity Issue Advocacy Mobilize Issue Publics?

Case studies and correlational evidence suggest that celebrity political advocacy leads to media coverage and public attention. With a new dataset of celebrity witnesses at congressional hearings, we develop a systematic analysis that allows us to estimate whether celebrities increase media coverage of the issues they advocate in official government venues. We also use this dataset to measure how much celebrity advocacy efforts increase public engagement with policy issues—a necessary condition for the expansion of issue publics. We find that the issues addressed in congressional hearings featuring celebrity witnesses are about three times more likely to be the subject of the New York Times reporting, but the average celebrity witness has no discernible effect on public issue attention, as measured by Wikipedia page views. We conclude that while the Internet vastly expands the opportunities for political communication, it is difficult to appropriate non-political social network infrastructures to promote policy change.

Journalism, Advocacy, and the Social Construction of Consensus

Scholarship examining media coverage of social problems largely examines coverage of contentious issues. In this study, I contribute to our understanding of journalist practices by examining coverage of an issue over which there is a US consensus: female genital cutting (FGC). With an analysis of newspaper coverage supplemented by interviews and primary documents, I find that, in contrast to existing literature that shows that reporters must refrain from issue advocacy, when consensus is widespread reporters can and do collaborate with advocates, harmonize with opinion writers, and use their physical presence and access to newsprint to pressure the state. Journalists, however, do not simply respond to consensus. Instead, I find that they can actively construct consensus by offering unique frames that depoliticize advocacy. These findings contribute to our understanding of media coverage of social problems by illustrating how consensus is both shaped by and shapes journalist practices.