Companies fall in and out of favour with brigades of marketers and brand managers trying to manage public opinion. One team of academics believes it has an insight that might help: it is the perception of a company’s “moral” profile that determines consumer attitudes towards a firm, even more so than product changes and brand identity transformation.

The team—from Harvard in the US and Bath and Warwick universities in the UK—drew their conclusions after observing comments about companies by almost 3,000 people on Twitter.

The results revealed that though most people view companies negatively in general, they can still come to see individual companies in a positive light.

However, that can change if companies are viewed as having declined “morally”.

“Consumers,” the research team writes, “judged that moral deteriorations were particularly disruptive to a firm’s identity—just as, or even more so, than moral improvement, product changes and brand personality changes.

“This effect occurred because consumers thought morally good traits were essential to a firm’s identity, such that losing these traits seemed to sever the firm’s persisting identity.”

But here’s the complicating factor for company managers. Perception of a company’s moral degradation, or, rise depends on the personal moral disposition of the consumer.

The customer is always right—or left

For example, when “conservative” companies are viewed as going “liberal”, conservative consumers view the corporate’s morals as breaking down. And vice versa when “liberal” companies appear to become more conservative.

This was in part illustrated by what happened when Twitter agreed to sell to Elon Musk. Examining the social media platform’s data for members of the US Senate, the academics found conservative senators gained more followers while liberals lost them.

Indeed, so marked were the changes that the team concludes that consumers are “more likely to say an individual firm is no longer the same firm anymore after it morally deteriorates versus improves.” Which, the team says, is consistent with the idea that companies are viewed as “possessing good true selves”.

Regardless of the detail, what the experiment adds up to is a conclusion that a company’s perceived “moral” profile is more important than any other element in forming its “identity” among consumers.

“For now, the current results suggest that consumers have a nuanced, intuitive theory of firms,” the researchers conclude. “Although consumers may have negative stereotypes of such firms as a group, they nonetheless view individual firms as having good essences that they either live up to or betray.”