Theorizing and Measuring General Nonmarket Communication

Firms increasingly use nonmarket communication, including communication related to corporate political activity, social responsibility, and activism. We argue that, in a polarized social media era, these domains are strongly interlinked and may even have significant overlap in firms’ public messaging. We introduce the concept of general nonmarket communication (GNC) to describe this phenomenon and measure it on social media using a large language model classifier. Using English-translated Twitter/X messages from large Finnish firms, we were able to accurately identify GNC. Our new measure and theorizing show strong face validity, practical significance, logical temporal and firm-specific variation, and predictive validity, as GNC messages perform better on social media in terms of audience engagement. Our unified construct has many implications for academic work and practice.