LAUSR

Abstract Recently, firms have increasingly approached their own customers for assistance with corporate political activities—a strategy known as constituency building. While constituency building efforts targeting shareholders and employees have been well-studied, relatively little is known about the impact of approaching consumers. Hence, this paper examines why consumers participate in corporate political activities on behalf of a brand, and we present three studies to explore this increasingly popular practice. First, Study 1 utilizes qualitative interviews with actual campaign participants to provide initial insights to develop our theoretical model, which we subsequently test in two experiments. Study 2 finds that brand loyalty is a key driver of consumer activism, with both direct and indirect effects through its impact on issue salience, information seeking behavior, and its interaction with the issue type. Finally, Study 3 finds that consumer activism is associated with increased brand loyalty, indicating that this may be a relationship building activity and an important dimension of the longer process of social exchange between the brand and consumer.