1. Introduction
The last decade has seen unprecedented turbulence which represented both opportunities and challenges for small businesses. On one hand, the United Nations general assembly has voiced its support and recently recognized the importance of micro, small, and medium enterprises in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of promoting innovation, creativity, and decent work for all [
1]. In parallel, as many industries become more globalized, many new and small businesses have collapsed due to increased competition [
2]. The failure of small and new entrants is particularly worrying because small businesses have long been identified as a key ingredient to the health and sustainability of a nation’s economic growth [
3]. Several regions have recently identified the need to protect small, local ‘underdog’ businesses against multinational behemoths such as AirBnB [
4] or Uber [
5]. Thus, many challenges remain to ensure the emergence and sustainability of small enterprises against the increasingly dominant incumbents in many industries.
When judging the outcome of a competition, it would perhaps be more intuitive to favor the side that is stronger, more privileged, or better equipped instead of the smaller or weaker side [
6,
7]. Nevertheless, an increasingly robust body of research has noted that some consumers may also favor the weaker underdogs who position themselves as passionate and determined, despite their disadvantaged position [
8]. In other words, the underdog effect suggests that consumers may show their support to companies who are expected to lose against advantaged opponents but try to fight regardless [
9]. The underdog effect has also been documented across Western and Eastern cultures [
10]. Consequently, some research has suggested that businesses should adopt an underdog positioning strategy, especially when challenging an incumbent market leader [
11].
Consumer research has proposed several alternatives to explain the effectiveness of an underdog positioning strategy. Consumers may support underdogs due to fairness or moral obligation principles [
11,
12]. Others suggest that consumers may perceive a closeness with the underdog offering when they could reflect aspects of the underdog experience in their own lives [
8]. However, in contrast to research that supports the underdog effect, others have argued that its effectiveness is limited. In this view, the success of underdog strategies may largely depend on contextual factors [
13,
14]. For instance, the underdog appeal may be more effective for hedonic products [
15] or for locally made products [
16]. Consumer characteristics such as pro-sociality and empathy may also moderate the impact of underdog appeals in influencing consumer attitude [
17]. More recently, literature has also pointed to the existence of a top dog effect, where underdog positioning produced more negative consumer response for products perceived to be high risk [
18]. These finding illustrate the complexity surrounding the underdog effect, and a significant gap exists where literature cannot yet fully explain the nuances of its efficacy. This gap in knowledge may further increase the risk of costly yet ineffective marketing strategies by small businesses. These businesses are the ones most likely to employ underdog appeals in their positioning against more established competitors but communicating these appeals to the wrong kind of consumers may lead to wasteful losses that small businesses may not be able to recover from.
The present study aims to increase understanding of the processes underlying the underdog effect by examining the mediating effect of perceived effort and the moderating role of consumer’s trait of agreeableness. Previous studies have implied that consumers are attracted to market offerings that portray themselves as fighting an uphill battle in their biography [
8], suggesting that part of the underdog appeal is due to consumers acknowledging and rewarding the efforts of the underdog market offering. However, studies found that although consumers are likely to reciprocate displays of the underdog’s efforts with positive attitudes, the effect dissipates when consumers infer that the effort was motivated by persuasion [
19]. In other words, consumers may not appreciate underdog marketing stunts that are seen to be self-serving ploys to increase sales [
14]. For instance, in mid-2020, Epic Games criticized the pricing policy of Apple’s digital app store by parodying Apple’s own famous “1984” ad [
20]. The original ad portrayed Apple as the underdog that challenged the dominance of IBM, whereas, in the parody, Apple itself had become the tyrant. While this effort produced significant positive awareness and response for Epic, it also drew controversy from others who suspected the company’s ulterior motives [
21]. Thus, while the underdog’s signals of high effort may be effective to trigger positive reactions among consumers with certain personalities, it may have the opposite effect on others.
In this study, we focus on the consumer trait of agreeableness [
22] as a potential moderator to examine its role in the relationship between the underdog’s perceived effort and consumer preference. Agreeableness is one of the five major dimensions in the Big Five personality inventory, alongside the dimensions of extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, and neuroticism [
23]. The inventory, also known as the OCEAN model for the acronym of its dimensions is among the most robust and often used theoretical lens to understand behavior in social psychology, as well as marketing [
24,
25]. Individuals with high agreeableness traits are described to be sympathetic, kind, and harmonious in relation to others [
23]. Agreeableness has also been shown to influence consumer behaviors that are arguably kindred to underdog support such as consumer engagement [
26] and forgiveness [
27]. Conversely, individuals who scored low in agreeableness tend to be described as antagonistic, suspicious, and less likely to get along with others. Thus, in the example above, we might infer that consumers who were critical towards the underdog’s strategy against Apple are likely to have scored low in agreeableness. However, to the best of our knowledge, this important personality trait has not yet been explicitly investigated in the context of underdog positioning.
Building on these past research studies, our research objective is to investigate how consumers’ agreeableness trait interacts with their perceived effort of the underdog offering to influence consumer preference. We then extend this to investigate whether trait agreeableness also influenced consumers’ willingness to sustain their patronage towards underdogs. In doing so, we contribute to the extant literature on the underdog effect by adding empirical findings relating to the role of an important yet previously unexamined variable. Secondly, our findings contribute to the literature that examines the effectiveness of underdog positioning by investigating the limits of the strategy’s efficacy. Lastly, our research adds emphasis to the importance of considering consumer profiles in marketing strategies. Recent studies suggest that market offerings need to adopt attractive personalities to connect with consumers and sustain themselves in the marketplace [
28]. While having a strong and favorable personality may result in success [
29], adopting appeals that are incompatible with consumers’ views may lead to boycotts and market failures [
30]. Our findings would thus inform how underdog small businesses should optimize their marketing strategy so that it reaches the most appropriate consumer segments, thus ensuring the sustainability of their business in the long term.
5. Discussion
Research examining the roles of psychological and personality factors as moderators of the underdog effect has greatly intensified within the last decade (see [
18] Appendix 1 for a table of recent research). Past findings have suggested that some consumers are likely to reciprocate displays of efforts [
19], while others may regard such displays as self-serving and respond negatively [
14]. Thus, what remains unclear are the nuances surrounding the effectiveness of underdog displays of effort among consumers with differing personality traits.
To close this gap, the current research explored the mediated relationships between the underdog condition, perceived effort, trait agreeableness and preferences. We found that the underdog conditions resulted in an increased positive perception of effort compared to top dogs despite both being described as achieving similar levels of success. Subsequently, we found evidence to suggest that consumers’ perceptions of effort act as a mediator between underdog positioning and consumer preference. Importantly, we established an important qualification on the underdog effect on consumer preferences by showing that the positive influence of underdog positioning strategies is strengthened among consumers with high agreeableness. That is, we show that not all consumers equally generate positive reactions towards the efforts that underdogs are perceived to possess relative to top dog offerings. We arrived at these results after considering the possible confounding factors of gender as well as the other personality traits in the Big Five personality model, namely, neuroticism, extraversion, openness, and conscientiousness. We further extended these findings and found that consumers with high trait agreeableness are also more likely to sustain long term patronage towards underdogs.
Taken together, the current research has several implications for the literature on the underdog effect. First, recent research [
49] found that consumers with strong ‘growth mindsets’ [
50] who value hard work and effort as routes to success were more likely to have empathetic feelings towards underdogs compared to those who considered success to be predetermined. Our research extends this by establishing the underlying process of how the underdog positioning of market offerings evokes higher perceptions of effort. We further demonstrate that this increased perception of effort plays a mediating role that positively drives consumer preference as well as willingness to commit towards underdogs. Second, a growing stream of contemporary research has been dedicated to examining the boundary conditions of the underdog effect [
13,
17,
51]. For instance, [
51] found that the underdog effect is stronger only among consumers who also perceive themselves as underdogs or victims of unfair circumstances. The study of [
13] found links between consumers’ perception of their own power and underdog preference. Meanwhile, [
17] found that consumers with prosocial orientations prefer underdogs but only at certain scarcity conditions in the marketplace. Overall, these findings illustrate that consumer traits and personalities have significant impacts on the underdog effect. Our findings add to this stream of literature by providing evidence that the underdog effect is more efficacious among consumers with high trait agreeableness. Lastly, as previously mentioned, the big five personality model is among the most robust and widely used psychometric inventory [
52]. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet explicitly examined consumer responses towards underdogs using this important theoretical lens. Our study may thus serve as a springboard for future research attempting to shine light on the nuances of the underdog effect.
The findings of this study also provide meaningful managerial implications. First, our study adds further support to the effectiveness of an underdog positioning strategy. However, we also show the importance of perceived effort as one of the pillars of such strategies. As such, marketers should focus on emphasizing the perception of efforts when positioning the underdog. Second, in contrast to what we term as the ‘David vs. Goliath’ strategy where the underdog is framed in relation to a powerful and hostile competitor [
53], our design shows that consumers’ positive reactions may also be cultivated through the underdog’s mere display of effort, without the need to cast a competitor in a negative light. Lastly, our findings that consumers with high agreeableness respond more favorably to underdogs indicate the importance of targeting marketing communications towards certain segments over others. Recent news reports document that firms are increasingly adept at profiling consumer personalities and characteristics based on their digital footprints [
54]. Thus, businesses that would like to convey underdog messages may benefit from these techniques to make sure that their messages are being received by the right kind of consumers. Using these refined marketing strategies is likely to contribute to the sustainability of small businesses who often have limited budgets.
Our findings and past literature suggest that there may be other conditions that either reverse or diminish the underdog effect. As with most studies, this research has several limitations. First, we employed scenario-based experiments, which limit the generalizability of the results to real-world. Further research might consider employing a field study to further extend the current finding’s validity. Second, our context of individual service providers (e.g., personal trainers) who are not yet established in the marketplace may not fully translate in situations where already established companies employ underdog biographies to persuade consumers. Lastly, although the underdog effect has been established across differing cultures, future research should consider the intercultural aspect of agreeableness as its moderator. Agreeableness entails the affinity to be pleasant and cooperative in social situations [
23]. Thus, individuals’ manifestation of agreeableness in collectivist societies may differ to those in individualist societies [
55]. Future research may wish to investigate whether perceived effort results in uniformly positive reactions among different types of offerings such as hedonic and utilitarian products or professional services. Second, investigating the influence of personality traits on different types of underdog strategies may provide meaningful results. As mentioned, underdogs sometimes portray themselves as victims of mistreatment against more powerful top dogs. Such strategies may appear to be effective to invite sympathy, especially among consumers who can identify themselves with the relatively powerless underdogs. However, past research has found that consumers who feel powerless wish to restore their feelings of superiority and thus may show greater support for dominant market offerings that denigrate others in their marketing messages [
56]. Given that underdog strategies are often utilized by smaller firms, more research is needed to better guide these businesses in utilizing their limited resources.