A strategy to communicate corporate social responsibility: cause related marketing and its dark side

Cause related marketing (CRM) is a strategy that aims to communicate a company's striving for corporate social responsibility and to improve brand image. A strategy to increase consumers' emotional involvement toward a product–cause association is to describe the cause in vivid terms. In two experiments we investigated how vivid messages might increase the effectiveness of CRM strategy. We sought to demonstrate that a vivid description of the cause could influence consumers' preferences and trust in the effective use of money collected by selling the product. Experiment 1 results showed that individuals prefer products associated with a vivid message of the social cause rather than products associated with a pallid message. Experiment 2 results suggested that vivid messages induce more positive affective reactions and a higher trust in the effective use of money than pallid ones. In the final section, the implications of CRM for corporate social responsibility are discussed.