Predicting the cause-related marketing participation intention by examining big-five personality traits and moderating role of subjective happiness

Cause-related marketing (CRM) has emerged as an effective strategic management tool that businesses have adopted by associating their brand with a designated cause. CRM activity is linked to a non-profit organization wherein the consumers participate via purchase-triggered donations. The impetus for businesses to engage in CRM is evident, but individual differences in CRM participation intention have not been thoroughly examined. Although personality has been established as a significant cause of individual differences in behaviour, there is no clear understanding of the effects of personality traits on corresponding processes underlying CRM participation intention. The current paper attempts to empirically predict the psychological processes (big five personality traits) eliciting CRM participation intention. In addition, we have examined and validated the moderating role of subjective happiness on personality traits and CRM participation intention. Primary data has been collected from 894 respondents and analysed by adopting deep neural network architecture based on the innovative dual-stage PLS-SEM and ANN methods to predict and rank the factors influencing the CRM participation intention. The results revealed the predictors of CRM participation intention by establishing normalized importance and found that agreeableness was the strongest predictor, followed by conscientiousness, subjective happiness, openness, age and extraversion. In contrast, neuroticism, education and income were found insignificant. The findings provide a valuable rationale to marketers and practitioners for employing personality profiling and predicting behaviours by personality traits, thereby engaging CRM consumers with content, messages or advertisement in a way that will resonate deeply with them.