A growing body of research considers how consumers react when companies become aligned with a stance on a polarized sociopolitical issue. Because stances on controversial issues can yield polarized and potentially offsetting responses from different consumer groups, it is important to understand individual-level reactions rather than only look at overall effects. Prior studies of individual responses have examined customer reactions to specific companies supporting a particular side of a given issue. However, no study has examined whether the resulting reactions may differ depending upon the side the company supports. This may limit the generalizeability of these findings, especially because sociopolitical alignment tends to be disproportionately carried out by a small number of companies and predominantly in support of left-wing positions on a small number of issues. We thus provide the first evidence on how customers react to corporate alignment on different sides of the same issue. We do this with two experiments involving well-known real-world companies (Bud Light and McDonald’s) which simultaneously were aligned with different stances on two controversial issues (transgender rights and Israel-Palestine). We find asymmetrically negative effects of sociopolitical alignment on customers: consumers react negatively when a company supports the opposing side but do not react positively when it supports the side they prefer. While the direction of consumer reactions are asymmetrically negative, this effect is symmetric across opposing stances on the same issue.
