Three Essays on the Effects of Ethical Attributes on Private Label and National Brands

Ethical attributes and social responsibility initiatives have become an important focus of attention among marketing researchers and practitioners. My dissertation focuses on how consumers respond to introducing product-related social responsibility initiatives/ethical attributes (i.e., attributes that reflect concern about social and environmental issues; Luchs et al. 2010) for different tiers of retailers’ private label brands (paper 1), brand attributes (paper 2), and brand concepts (paper 3). In paper one, building on research in social responsibility and evolutionary psychology, we introduce a conceptual model and opposing predictions to explore how social responsibility initiatives can be integrated into different quality tiers (high vs. low) of retailers’ private label brands (PLBs). The results of two experiments show that social responsibility initiatives enhanced consumer evaluations of high-tier PLBs but hurt consumer evaluations of low-tier PLBs. These findings were more consistent with an explanation based on resource synergy beliefs rather than costly signaling theory.