Corporate social responsibility and cause-related marketing: an overview

This article looks at the subject of corporate social responsibility and how companies use it in their marketing communication activities, a practice known as cause-related marketing (CRM). According to the definition of Angelidis and Ibrahim (1993), corporate social responsibility is ‘corporate social actions whose purpose is to satisfy social needs’. Corporate social responsibility requires investment and it yields measurable outcomes.It is commonly accepted that cause-related marketing is a communications tool for increasing customer loyalty and building reputation. The expected change in a company's image because of CRM campaigns appears to depend a great deal upon how customers perceive the reasons for a company's involvement in cause-related programmes and the amount of help given to the cause through a company's involvement (Webb and Mohr, 1998). Mohr et al. (1998) suggest that consumers with a high level of scepticism will be less likely to respond positively to CRM campaigns as opposed to consumers with a low level of scepticism.