When Doing Good Comes With Stigma

Based on research by Diana Jue-Rajasingh (Rice Business) and Wesley W. Koo (Johns Hopkins)

Key findings:

• Origin stories that highlight roots in marginalized communities carry social risk for consumers outside of those groups, making them wary of buying in.
• Research shows the key reason for this is stigma transfer — the fear that purchasing the product will signal lower status by association.
• However, framing the origin story in a certain way can encourage those same consumers to offer non-purchase support, such as joining a mailing list.

New research from Rice Business assistant professor Diana Jue-Rajasingh suggests an uncomfortable challenge for social-venture founders: the very origin story that grounds their mission may, in some contexts, limit their ability to grow.

Before earning her Ph.D., Jue-Rajasingh co-founded Essmart, a company that distributes socially beneficial products across rural India. As Essmart pursued new customers, she struggled with how to present the company’s rural roots in a way that would appeal to a more affluent audience.

“Do we emphasize our rural origin story as we expand? That was something we had to think about,” Jue-Rajasingh says. “Is it even useful to talk about the good we’re doing in villages when we’re marketing to people who may not care about that?”

Other social entrepreneurs shared the same hesitation with her. Some worried that affluent customers might not just be indifferent but actively turned off by origin stories centered on marginalized communities. To understand whether that concern held up, Jue-Rajasingh partnered with longtime collaborator Wesley Koo at Johns Hopkins University.

In a new paper in the Strategic Management Journal, they examine whether sharing a social venture’s origin story appeals to new customers — and how framing that story, whether through social impact or product design, shapes its effectiveness.

When Origin Stories Backfire

Their survey-based field experiment confirmed the concern. Affluent, urban customers who heard an origin story tied to a poor, rural community tended to stigmatize the original customer base and became less inclined to purchase the product. Framing mattered: stories connecting rural roots to product design softened the reaction, while stories centered on social benefits heightened it. Still, any reference to social roots reduced willingness to buy.

Jue-Rajasingh and Koo centered the study on Saathi Pads, a growing enterprise founded in 2015 to increase access to sanitary pads in rural India. Its early decentralized production model proved financially unsustainable, prompting a shift to centralized manufacturing and a new urban market — raising the question of how, or whether, to foreground Saathi’s social-mission origins.

To test the effects, the researchers recruited 283 female respondents at a university in Delhi and presented four versions of Saathi’s origin story: a basic rural-roots version; a technology version highlighting design choices; a social-impact version; and a combined tech-social version. A control group received no origin story. Participants then evaluated the company, product quality, and their likelihood of purchasing or recommending the pads.

“Part of me wants to say, ‘Own your story.’ But another part of me says, for the sake of ensuring you can grow your company, remember that sometimes you can’t tell the same story to everyone.”

The Role of Stigma Transfer

As it turned out, none of the four framings increased purchase intent compared with the control condition of no origin story at all. Interestingly, however, respondents exposed to the social-impact version were slightly more willing to support the company in non-purchase ways, such as joining a mailing list.

To understand the aversion to these stories, the researchers tested three explanations: misunderstanding of the venture’s social mission, skepticism about motives and stigma transfer. The analysis pointed to this third explanation, stigma transfer, as the primary mechanism. Respondents who grew up in cities, had higher-status parents and reported higher incomes were especially likely to rate Saathi and its products as inferior after hearing the rural origin story.

“At first, the stigma finding surprised me,” Jue-Rajasingh says. But it also echoed her experience as a founder. “When we promoted our organization, we often featured a middle-class person on a poster to inspire lower-income audiences. I noticed organizations never did the reverse.”

The Importance of Strategic Storytelling

Jue-Rajasingh admits she feels conflicted about the implications of her study’s findings for social ventures.

“Part of me wants to say, ‘Own your story.’ But another part of me says, for the sake of ensuring you can grow your company, remember that sometimes you can’t tell the same story to everyone.”

Her findings also point to several areas where more research is needed. This study focused on a specific context — an Indian social enterprise, a women’s health product and an urban university sample — all of which shape how status dynamics show up. Future work could test whether similar stigma-transfer effects appear in different countries, with different types of products or across other consumer groups. 

Another open question is whether certain forms of messaging, visual cues or trust-building strategies can reduce or counteract the stigma mechanism rather than simply avoiding it.

Still, Jue-Rajasingh says there are practical takeaways for founders and managers now. For example, audience targeting matters. “As much as you can, try to target your audience,” she says. “For a mainstream audience, emphasize how the origin story can benefit them; maybe that’s a design or technology tie-in. But for the original customers, those who really do care — you can keep telling your social origin story.”

In other words, the story doesn’t need to disappear. But social-venture leaders may need to decide when to center it, when to reframe it and when to let the product speak first.

Written by Katie Gilbert

Jue-Rajasingh and Koo, “From Margins to Mainstream: The Narrative Dilemma in Scaling Social Ventures.” Strategic Management Journal 46.11 (2025): 2690-2719. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.3737