The Cause Matters! How Cause Marketing Campaigns Can Increase the Demand for Conventional over Green Products

Sarah S. Müller, Nina Mazar and Anne J. Fries

Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 2016, vol. 1, issue 4, 540 - 554

Abstract: Customers are increasingly attentive to the social and ethical ramifications of their consumption, which threatens the demand particularly for conventional over green products, as it may increase guilt and thus dull the hedonistic feelings experienced with those products. In an attempt to counteract this threat, some companies utilize cause-related marketing (CM) campaigns, in which they offer to offset some of their products' negative side effects. However, as such campaigns may emphasize the product's harmfulness, it is not clear if they are beneficial. One field and one laboratory experiment, both incentive-compatible involving real purchases, show that customers are more likely to buy a conventional over a green product when the former is bundled with a campaign that is offsetting an unrelated problem rather than a problem caused by the product--unless the donation offsets the specific damage caused by the customers' own consumption. These effects are mediated by guilt.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/688437 (application/pdf)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/688437 (text/html)
Access to the online full text or PDF requires a subscription.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ucp:jacres:doi:10.1086/688437

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of the Association for Consumer Research from University of Chicago Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Journals Division ().