Cause-Related Marketing: The Role Of Partnership And Product-Fit Aspects In Influencing Consumers’ Participation

Cause-related marketing (CRM) has been applied by various brands, both in enhancing consumers’ perception of the brand social concern, and to generate more sales. There are two delivery patterns for CRM: conventional and social alliance (Liu and Ko, 2010). The conventional pattern is done by the company exclusively. Meanwhile, in the social alliance pattern, marketer creates a partnership with a non-profit organization. Although the main aim of CRM is to improve the corporate image, it was proven that company can increase its profit by applying CRM (Krishna and Rajan, 2009). CRM focuses on a distinct cause that can be related to the corporation or their product. The distinctiveness can be established by considering the cause-brand fit (Bigne-Alcaniz et al., 2012; Myers et al., 2012). The CRM program that tied to a particular brand is possible to strengthen the brand social image. The main purpose of this working paper is to examine consumer willingness to participate in the marketer’s CRM program based on the partner-fit and the cause-brand fit. The study will manipulate four conditions in applying CRM program, which employing experiment approach. The design of study will be 2 (partner: brand-partner fit vs. brand-partner not fit) X 2 (cause: product-related vs. non product-related) between subject. The expected practical contribution from this working paper is to offer alternative considerations for applying CRM program that will give a stronger preference from consumer.