Online cause-related marketing: how does it influence consumers’ evaluations and purchase intention?

Online sales continue to grow fast throughout the world and companies have taken notice. They are investing to ensure that they don’t lose customers and one such way that they can do that is through cause-related marketing. Cause-related marketing uses ideas from various specialized areas such as the communication mix, corporate social responsibility, marketing for non-profit organizations and can provide benefits for all parties involved in the process, including the cause and consumers, and as such it can be a powerful tool. The purpose of this research is to determine how cause-related marketing will influence consumers in an online environment. To study this, a quantitative and cross-sectional study was carried out with a sample of 150 respondents. The study was conducted through an experiment, aimed at determining the effects of cause-brand fit and consumer-cause identification on consumers’ evaluations of online stores and online purchase intention. Structural equation modeling was used to examine the results of the experiment. The results show that consumer-cause identification has a positive impact on perceived value, and that this relationship is moderated by brand-cause fit, while revealing that it doesn’t influence online purchase intention. Brand-cause fit was shown to also have a positive influence on trust and online purchase intention, which is also impacted by perceived value. Trust on the other hand was shown to be a predictor of perceived value but not online purchase intention. Further discussion on the results and their managerial implications was conducted.