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This paper aims to shed light on the emerging position of companies taking stances on sociopolitical issues and the impact this has on consumers.

The paper uses focus groups, interviews and consumer experiments in various countries, to provide insights as to why brands are taking sociopolitical stances.

Consumers expect brands to take a stance on sociopolitical issues. However, to be credible, a stance needs to be rooted in a long-term commitment that aligns with the brand’s strategy and values. Perceived authenticity is key.

Future studies should aim at broader generalizability and should address various industries.

Differentiating a brand through a sociopolitical stance requires a strategic approach. Brand managers need to identify which issues they should support, how to engage with them and the risks and opportunities involved.

While the impact of brands adopting a sociopolitical stance has been discussed in the mainstream media, there has been a lack of empirical evidence to support the arguments. The results of the four studies discussed in the paper provide insights and demonstrate the brand-related opportunities and risks of taking a sociopolitical stance.

Over the past 20 years, partial least squares (PLS) has become a popular method in marketing research. At the same time, several methodological studies have demonstrated problems with the technique but have had little impact on its use in marketing research practice. This study aims to present some of these criticisms in a reader-friendly way for non-methodologists.

Key critiques of PLS are summarized and demonstrated using existing data sets in easily replicated ways. Recommendations are made for assessing whether PLS is a useful method for a given research problem.

PLS is fundamentally just a way of constructing scale scores for regression. PLS provides no clear benefits for marketing researchers and has disadvantages that are features of the original design and cannot be solved within the PLS framework itself. Unweighted sums of item scores provide a more robust way of creating scale scores.

The findings strongly suggest that researchers abandon the use of PLS in typical marketing studies.

This paper provides concrete examples and techniques to practicing marketing and social science researchers regarding how to incorporate composites into their work, and how to make decisions regarding such.

This work presents a novel perspective on PLS critiques by showing how researchers can use their own data to assess whether PLS (or another composite method) can provide any advantage over simple sum scores. A composite equivalence index is introduced for this purpose.