Cause-Related Marketing and Attitude Toward Corporate Image: An Experimental Study

Abstract

In a world of attention scarcity, cause-related marketing strategies generate a substantially greater impact. The neurophysiological mechanisms that support favorable consumer attitudes toward cause-related marketing messages are, however, rather little understood. This study attempts to comprehend how a marketer may employ cause-related marketing initiatives to improve the company’s reputation as well as how program, company, and product identities affect consumers’ attitude toward the corporate image. Following the classical experimental design, this study uses four stimuli to investigate the effects of cause type and cause category on attitude toward corporate image. The four different stimuli used in this study are exposure to a negative corporate image of a fictitious brand, exposure to a negative corporate image with exposure to cause-related marketing message on Save Amazon Rainforest, exposure to a negative corporate image, and exposure to cause-related marketing message on Educate Homeless Children project, and exposure to a negative corporate image and exposure to cause-related marketing message on feeding the hungry homeless children with a description about the gravity of hunger among the poor homeless children of India. For this study, 1,171 urban Indian consumers were used as the sample. The study suggests that empathy-embedded cause-related marketing communications are characterized by primary need-based humanitarian causes. This study thus validates the mirror neuron hypothesis, which confirms that customer-centricity increases with the degree to which the communication content is similar to that of the respondent. A higher degree of customer-centricity results in a better advertisement attitude, which improves consumer attitude toward the corporate image.