Effect of Cause-Related Marketing on Attitudes and Purchase Intentions: The Moderating Role of Cause Involvement and Donation Size

SUMMARY The purpose of the present research was to examine the role of involvement and donation in moderating the effect of cause related marketing (CRM) and ordinary marketing (OM) on consumer attitudes and purchase intentions. It is proposed that the level of involvement (i.e., high or low involvement) may make either veridical information (i.e., high involvement) or peripheral cues (i.e., low involvement) in the message more salient, and hence, more relevant and more important in the formation of attitudes and purchase intentions. Therefore, the level of donation size (i.e., high or low level) may be perceived either as an important element in the message (i.e., high involvement) or as a peripheral cue (i.e., low involvement). It is hypothesized that in conditions where there is a match between levels of involvement and donation (i.e., high-high or low-low), CRM would be superior to OM in creating favorable attitudes and purchase intentions whereas in conditions where there is a mismatch between (i.e., high-low and low-high), OM would be superior to CRM. To test these hypotheses, half of the subjects were shown painful images (i.e., high cause involvement) and the other half were shown pleasant images concerning the cause (i.e., low cause involvement). In one half of the ads, 5% of sales were claimed to be donated (i.e., high donation) and 0.1% in the other (i.e., low donation). In one half of the ads, a fictitious nonprofit organization (NPO) was affiliated with the experimental brand and claimed to work on the sponsored cause (i.e., CRM) and in the other half there was no mention of a specific cause (i.e., OM). Results from several ANOVA analyses supported the hypotheses and all hypotheses were accepted.