No Guns Allowed: How Retail Gun Control Policies and Consumer Values Influence Retailer Evaluations

EasyChair Preprint no. 6886

Abstract

This research investigates how the adoption of a gun control policy by a retailer influences consumers’ brand favorability. Across four studies, this research documents several findings. First, we find that the adoption of a gun control policy by a retailer increases consumers’ brand favorability. Second, we highlight a boundary condition to this effect, such that a gun control policy actually decreases consumers’ brand favorability for people high (vs. low) in support for gun rights. Third, we show that value congruence (i.e., the alignment between a consumer’s own personal values and perceptions of a brand’s values) is the psychological process underlying these effects. Fourth, we generalize the focal effects to a real world brand and, most interestingly and unexpectedly, demonstrate that the adoption of a gun control policy increases brand favorability for consumers low (vs. high) in patronage behavior of the brand. Finally, we find that a pioneer brand strategy in the adoption of a gun control policy amongst its competition significantly increases brand favorability, while a follower brand strategy in the adoption of such a policy is less effective.

Keyphrases: brand favorability, gun control, gun control policy, retailer evaluations, value congruence

@Booklet{EasyChair:6886,
  author = {Frank Cabano and Amin Attari and Elizabeth Minton},
  title = {No Guns Allowed: How Retail Gun Control Policies and Consumer Values Influence Retailer Evaluations},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint no. 6886},

  year = {EasyChair, 2021}}