The Consumer Attitudes Of Cause-Related Marketing

Fulfilling the social responsibilities may have a conflict with corporation profits objectives, in such a dilemma, cause-related marketing provided corporation with the idea of an operational tool that will combine the charitable goals with enterprise business objectives, it becomes an effective social marketing strategy-oriented tool. However, cause-related marketing is not a marketing tool of abuse; it works only on considering the relevant factors on the base of full understanding of consumer's attitude of cause-related marketing. Due to different national conditions, the applicability of cause-related marketing in China has not yet to be verified, and cause-related marketing in China, the practice and theoretical research have not carried out a lot, there are not many researches on domestic academic journals and magazines in public. Most researches are just the conclusion on foreign study, the theoretical studies are few.In such background, based on reviewing related literatures and depth interviews, this study constructed a theoretical model introducing the mechanism of how enterprise reputation, perceived motivation, customer trust, consumer altruistic intention influence consumer behavior intention, explaining the causality among consumer cognation, consumer affect, consumer behavior and consumer intention, forming a consumer attitude model of cause-related marketing.The research carried through the empirical study on the proposed theoretical model making use of questionnaire survey, statistical software analysis. The results showed that in China, the attitude of cause-related marketing is basically positive; the activity evaluation, enterprise reputation, altruism motive perception, customer trust, altruistic tendency of consumer have a positive impact on behavioral intention, and self-regard motivation perception has a negative impact to behavioral intention; enterprise reputation, altruism motive perception, the trust in benevolence and integrity, altruistic tendency of consumer have a significant positive impact on activity evaluation, self-regard motivation perception and the trust in capability have no significant impact on activity evaluation; the trust in benevolence and integrity has the greatest influence on behavioral intention, the trust in benevolence and integrity and altruistic motives perception have the greatest influence on activity evaluation.According to the conclusions of the study, managerial implications are as follows: the enterprises should pay attention to the maintenance and enhancement of reputation; need to take measures to guide the consumer to the enterprise altruistic motive perception; enhance product quality, maintain and enhance the core values of product; make sure that the information of cause-related marketing activity is true and reliable, ensure that information between businesses and consumers is symmetrical.