This thesis examines the influence of cause activities in cause related marketing which have been recently implemented by many companies.
First of all, this thesis uses the two different concepts of product attributes - hedonic and utilitarian. To an...
This thesis examines the influence of cause activities in cause related marketing which have been recently implemented by many companies.
First of all, this thesis uses the two different concepts of product attributes - hedonic and utilitarian. To analyze how much charity activities conducted by companies can affect customers' perception of companies' image, this thesis adopts four different types of advertisements. The four types are hedonic-charity based cause activities, hedonic-function based activities, utilitarian-charity based cause activities and utilitarian-function based activities.
In addition, this thesis analyzes the two factors - social contribution image and products image - which play a critical role to build corporate image and how the two factors work to boost overall corporate image.
The major findings of this study can be summarized as follow :
For companies which turn out products with hedonic or utilitarian attribute, conducting charity based activities is more effective than function based activities to build positive image on their products as well as companies.
When a company conducts charity based activities, products with hedonic attribute are more strongly believed to be positive by customers than products with utilitarian attribute in terms of social contribution image and products image.
When a company conducts the charity based activities, products with utilitarian attribute are more positively evaluated in social contribution image than products promoted by function based activities. No matter what kinds of charity activities companies conduct, however, the results show only a little difference about products image.
In conclusion, doing charity based activities is proved to be the best way to improve corporate image. If a company only wants to beef up the image of its products with utilitarian attribute, conducting function based activities is effective exceptionally. These activities can be used as a successful marketing strategies to maximize corporate profit when a company launches new products.