Beneficiaries’ misery: how serendipitously benefitting from a crisis affects perceptions toward companies’ crisis relief actions

Abstract

At times of crisis, companies strategically communicate their CSR initiatives, expecting benefits from such communication. Results from six studies indicate that the benefits a company receives from CSR communication during a crisis depend on their perceived status as "beneficiary" or "losing." Differentiating from other works, this paper shows that serendipitously benefiting from a crisis for a firm can lead to negative reactions from the public to the firm's crisis-relief actions. Using six studies of various crisis scenarios, such as the COVID pandemic, the Brazilian supply crisis, Turkey's wildfires, and the Ukraine-Russo war, we showed that when "beneficiary" (compared to "losing") companies in a crisis communicated their CSR activities, they faced less willingness from consumers to spread positive word-of-mouth and less willingness to help the company in public. The perceived sincerity of those companies mediated this negative effect, and larger firms suffered more from it as they would be perceived as less sincere. However, when large "beneficiary" companies communicate their in-kind (material) rather than monetary (financial) donations during a crisis, the negative effect of the company's status on the public's attitudes towards the firm decreases.