Political polarization continues to grow in the U.S., prompting considerable research in marketing on the effects of individuals’ political identities on their behaviors as customers. Underpinning this stream of research is an assumption that individuals’ political orientations drive their customer behaviors. While this approach has generated important insights, it covers only one dimension of political polarization – ideologically-driven asymmetries differentiating those on the “left” versus the “right” – and thus provides an incomplete picture of the implications of political polarization to marketers. The authors introduce a previously overlooked dimension of political polarization – political intensity – focusing on how those closer to the far ends of the political spectrum (on the “left” and “right”) are similar to each other and different from those with weaker and moderate identities. They propose distinct effects of political intensity (beyond those of political orientation) on customer loyalty and brand advocacy, outline the mechanisms underlying these effects, and show that they are stronger in market-based contexts (competitor-related, product launches and promotions; firm-related, failures) that otherwise threaten customer-brand relationships, but weaker in a nonmarket context (customer-brand political misalignment) contradicting customers’ foundational political values. These relationships are tested across nine studies that utilize a variety of data sources and estimation approaches.
Read
