The Minority Ownership Awareness Effect: When Promoting Minority Ownership Increases Brand Evaluations

Recent social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, have prompted brands and retailers to increase the use of minority ownership labels (e.g., Black-owned, woman-owned). The current research examines when and why minority ownership awareness influences consumer behavior, particularly for brand failures. When a brand failure occurs, minority ownership awareness can result in higher brand evaluations and greater willingness to pay, a phenomenon referred to as the minority ownership awareness effect. This effect and its boundary conditions are demonstrated through five experiments and analyses of over 27,000 Google reviews for Black-owned restaurants. The authors propose that minority ownership awareness invokes a type of underdog effect, which is pronounced in situations involving product (vs. moral) failures, among people with low (vs. high) social dominance orientation, and among those people with a high (vs. low) internal motivation to respond without prejudice.