| Transnational Philanthropy is an important tool to influence consumers’ evaluation of brands,and how to play the role of transnational philanthropy well is an important issue for brand development and management.So far,studies on brands’ transnational Philanthropy have mainly focused on the perspective of consumers in the host country,missing the research on the perspective of consumers in the source country.This study suggests that the degree of brand internationalization,the most important intrinsic attribute in a brand’s cross-board philanthropic behavior,affects the brand evaluation of consumers after cross-board philanthropy.Based on the perspective of source country consumers and combined with theories related to legitimacy,this study explores the impact of transnational philanthropy of brands with different degrees of internationalization on the brand evaluation of source country consumers through a research test of two scenario experiments,and draws three main conclusions.First,the impact of cross-board philanthropy on consumers differs across brands with different degrees of internationalization;specifically,brands with higher degrees of internationalization receive higher local consumer evaluations for engaging in cross-board philanthropy compared to brands with lower degrees of internationalization.Second,legitimacy mediates the impact of transnational philanthropy on consumer evaluations in the source country.Specifically,cognitive legitimacy and moral legitimacy mediate the impact of transnational philanthropy by international and local brands on local consumer evaluations.Third,event acuteness moderates the impact of brands’ transnational philanthropic behavior on consumer brand evaluations;specifically,in scenarios with high event acuteness,brands with low internationalization receive higher moral legitimacy and cognitive legitimacy when they engage in transnational philanthropy,ultimately generating higher consumer evaluations;while in scenarios with low event acuteness,brands with high internationalization receive higher cognitive legitimacy and moral legitimacy,and ultimately generate higher consumer ratings.Therefore,brands should adopt different response strategies for different types of events.This study enriches the theories related to brand cross-board philanthropy,especially in terms of the impact of brand cross-board philanthropy on consumers in the source countries,and verifies the important role of brand cross-board philanthropy on consumers’perception of rationality and brand evaluation in the source countries by means of empirical analysis. |
