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The Noble Edge Effect: Why We Tend To Favor Brands That Show Care for Societal Issues
Why Phish Food Tastes Better Than KitKat
What is it?
The noble edge effect describes how we experience products created by socially responsible companies as being better than rival products created by socially indifferent or self-interested companies.
The seminal study
Despite research showing that socially responsible firms deliver superior financial performance, corporate social responsibility is often viewed by managers merely as a tool to enhance companies’ reputations and goodwill among customers, but costly to the bottom line.
In 2015, Alexander Chernev and Sean Blair set out to dispel these negative assumptions and show that social responsibility could be profitable. In a series of experiments, they showed that acts of corporate social responsibility — even those unrelated to the company’s core business — could make consumers perceive a company’s products as having superior performance even when they directly observe and experience the product.
In their first experiment, participants took part in a wine-tasting task. They were given a small sample of red wine in an unmarked plastic cup, along with a card introducing the…
