Cohesion or Coercion? Why Coordinated Behavior Backfires in Marketing Contexts

Consumers often see brands and other organizations in the marketplace engaging in various actions. Moreover, subordinate representatives of an overarching organization (e.g., sub-brands, product lines, branches, departments, etc.) can each engage in actions that may or may not be the same as other representatives from the same organization. For example, NFL teams have raised awareness for breast cancer for many years, and each team performed the same actions to promote this unified cause. However, in 2017, the campaign changed such that teams could elect to support different types of cancers—teams performed different actions. The present research asks which strategy consumers perceive to be more effective: Should organizational actors coordinate their actions, or should they engage in various actions? Previous research in entitativity provides one potential answer. Entitativity refers to the extent to which individuals are perceived to form a single coherent group (Hamilton and Sherman 1996). This literature has demonstrated that when group members coordinate their actions, the group is perceived as more competent (Callahan and Ledgerwood 2016; Ip, Chiu, and Wan 2006). Thus, entitativity suggests that organizational actions should be coordinated, not varied. However, I propose that consumers apply a different set of assumptions about the motivating force behind actions performed by organizational entities (vs. individual people): Individual people are assumed to have agency over their own actions; therefore, coordination is a signal of group cohesiveness and increases perceived competence (Ip et al. 2006). On the other hand, organizational actions are determined by superordinate levels of the hierarchy. Therefore, coordination may signal coercion rather than cohesiveness, whereas non-coordination may signal non-coercion—i.e., that subordinate entities have agency over their actions. If this is the case, observing varied (vs. coordinated) actions should increase the perceived impact of the actions.