Trust in Brand Activism: A look at self-love campaigns of beauty brands

Abstract: In recent years, brand activism has been mentioned as a new evolution in corporate sociopolitical involvement. From the customers’ perspective, they expect brands to be more vocal and take a stance to tackle challenges. They do not want neutral brands anymore. However, in the rising trend of brands becoming activists, the debates of “trustwashing” also arise. Most existing research regard of brand activism mentioned this issue but there is a gap in understanding the problem from customers’ insight. On the balance between messages and actions, what can increase the trust of customers in brand activism campaigns is still a gap to be studied. By adopting the theory of the Elaboration Likelihood Model by Petty and Cacioppo (1986) and research on brand trust, this research conceptualises a new model with more predictors for trust in brand activism. The purpose is to investigate which factors can affect customers’ beliefs about brand activism. An online survey was conducted to ask female respondents to evaluate the self-love campaigns of two popular beauty brands: Dove and The Body Shop. Through calculating and analysing the opinions of 238 females, the research comes to a conclusion that the argument strength of brand activism messages is the most important element influencing customers’ trust with brand activism campaigns. It contributes to the brand activism literature by examining the phenomenon from a new aspect with empirical results.