Cross-affinity effects of cat and dog products and corporate social responsibility appeals (CSRAs)

With the growing number of pet owners in the marketplace, marketing academics and managers are becoming more interested in how pet owners make purchase decisions for themselves and their pets. Using scanner data of more than 23 million transactions across 875,853 unique baskets, this paper empirically examines the cross-category relationships between cat and dog product purchases and purchases of human products that have corporate social responsibility appeal (CSRA) messages on their packages. Our modeling approach is based on affinity analysis, which is a form of market basket analysis that allows us to examine the co-occurrence of items from separate product categories in a market basket. We hypothesize that the cross-affinity effects (i.e., cross-category dependencies) between pet products and CSRA products are influenced by the type of pet (i.e., cat versus dog). We find that the cross-affinities between pet products and functional CSRA products (i.e., organic and eco-friendly items) are stronger in cat-owner baskets, whereas the cross-affinities between pet products and symbolic CSRAs products (i.e., cause-related marketing, cruelty-free, and fair-trade items) are stronger in dog-owner baskets.Furthermore, the results suggest that anincrease in thesize of the market basket attenuates the cross-category affinities between cat and dog products and CSRA products.