Abstract

Companies focus on addressing societal issues and promoting their brands empathetically to maintain their competitive edge. Cause-related marketing is a key aspect of corporate social responsibility, but customers often doubt the intentions behind such campaigns and become skeptical.

This study explores the impacts of various factors, psychographic factors (collectivism and individualism), personality traits (self-esteem and cynicism), and demographic factors (age and gender) on skepticism towards cause-related marketing campaigns. It also examines how this skepticism influences outcomes such as negative word-of-mouth and patronage intention.

The research follows the stimulus-organism-response framework to assess the factors related to cause-related marketing. This study is based on Mehrabian and Russell's (1974) stimulus-organism-response (SOR) paradigm, which serves as the theoretical framework. According to this model, inputs influence an individual's cognitive and emotional responses, which in turn drive behavior, allowing certain behaviors to be predicted. Marketing stimuli related to causes are suggested to affect the organism's state (Hussain et al., 2023). The conceptual framework seeks to understand how cause-related marketing impacts consumers' cognitive and behavioral responses.

A quantitative methodology was employed in this study, collecting data from 409 respondents. The results show that men and younger individuals are generally more skeptical than women and older groups. Additionally, collectivist individuals are less skeptical than individualistic ones, while people with higher self-esteem exhibit less skepticism. Cynicism, on the other hand, is positively linked to skepticism towards cause-related marketing. This study contributes to marketing knowledge and offers valuable insights for marketers and business managers on how customer skepticism impacts campaign outcomes.