If you frame a coupon as a way to 'steal resources' from a big corporation, twice as many people will jump through hoops to get it.
Contrary to the idea that people prefer to engage with 'friendly' or 'small' businesses, this field experiment with 77,000 customers found that anti-corporate sentiment can actually drive engagement. People were twice as likely to participate when they viewed the act as a 'Robin Hood' opportunity to take money back from a large firm.
Robin Hood in a Field Experiment: Moral Framing, Discontent with Big Business, and Consumer Behavior
SSRN · 6323661
We investigate how framing-based information about a large corporation shapes anticorporate behavior in a large-scale real-effort field experiment with a Fortune 500 firm and about 77,000 customers. Participants were offered a low-value coupon that required substantial effort to claim, making participation economically unattractive. Participation varied sharply with how we framed the sponsoring firm and the claiming act: labeling the sponsor as a large corporation and framing claiming as an oppo