Impact of Global Brand Chief Marketing Officers’ Corporate Social Responsibility and Sociopolitical Activism Communication on Twitter

Chief marketing officers (CMOs) engage with their stakeholders on social media platforms to create a digital impact. CMO communication on societal issues is understudied despite heightened global attention to brands’ social practices. This poses three research questions: (1) How central is corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sociopolitical activism in the communication of global brands’ CMOs?, (2) Does CMOs’ communication about CSR or sociopolitical activism have a digital impact?, and (3) How do brand origin (i.e., geographic location of headquarters) and CMO nationality (U.S. vs. non-U.S.) moderate the CSR/sociopolitical activism–digital communication impact? Drawing on expectancy violation theory, this research (N_tweets = 17,468 over N_CMOs = 81) finds that CMOs rarely publish CSR or sociopolitical activism communication on Twitter (5.3% and 3.2%) and demonstrates a higher digital impact of retweets for CSR and a lower impact for sociopolitical activism tweets than regular communication. Furthermore, non-U.S. headquarters and CMO nationality strengthen the positive effect of CSR communication and weaken the negative effect of sociopolitical activism communication.