Audience response to brand activism: An alignment evaluation framework

Evolving from emerging expectations of brands to take action on societal issues, a comprehensive framework is introduced for advertising account planners to evaluate how well a brand’s activism initiative aligns with the cultural and social issues of its audience. Contextualised within brand activism alignment literature, the current research investigates audience responses to Bud Light’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Using topic modelling, textual analysis and discussion, the proposed framework is evaluated for its ability to help guide advertisers while also mitigating risk in brand activism endeavours. The findings are discussed in relation to four potential scenarios that advertising strategists may use to navigate brand activism choices. Natural language processing methods are employed as a research strategy to shed light on the potential for a mismatch between Bud Light’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney and their audience. This paper describes how framework proposes research questions to understand the main message and benefit of a tactic to a brand’s target audience, as well as how the audience’s response may be seen online using the concept of affordances in social media.