The practice of companies linking the purchases of their products or the use of services with making donations to charity or cause is referred to as 'cause-related marketing'. The purpose of cause-related marketing is both to increase business perform...
The practice of companies linking the purchases of their products or the use of services with making donations to charity or cause is referred to as 'cause-related marketing'. The purpose of cause-related marketing is both to increase business performance and to contribute to public/social causes.
Cause-related marketing has evolve from a short-term tactics used to spike sales into a powerful positioning discipline used to enliven brand equity. It is related to the development of branding through three stage : reason, emotion and spirit. In the stage of spirit branding, what makes cause-related marketing so successful is the consumer's desire to find meaning and value in their purchase. Thus the important element of cause-related marketing is consumer's response or attitude. But the studies dealing with its effects on brand performance and consumer specific factors affecting cause brand have not much done yet. In this respect this study was designed to find out consumer specific factors which have an influence on cause brand and investigate whether the consumer specific factors affect attitude toward the cause brand.
Mojor findings of this research are as follows. Consumer specific factors found in a review of previous studies conducted are 5 factors : the perceived motivation underlying the company's caure-related marketing effort, the level of consumer involvement toward related cause, the understanding about the company's social responsible activity, attitude toward helping others and consumer's belief in corporate social responsibility. Under empirical survey, firstly the perceived motivation underlying the company's caure-related marketing effort, the level of consumer involvement toward related cause and the understanding about the company's social responsible activity are found to positively affects corporate image. second, the level of consumer involvement toward related cause and attitude toward helping others are found to positively affects consumer-company identification. Third, consumer-company identification is found to positively affects corporate image and corporate image is found to positively affects attitude toward the cause brand.