Charitable programs and the retailer: Do they mix?

As cause marketing promotions become more prevalent, retailers must develop an increasing understanding of how consumers evaluate such offers. Using attribution theory and the gift-giving literature, we derive four predictions about conditions that may lead cause-marketing efforts to be evaluated more positively. The conditions are donation situation (disaster vs. ongoing cause), congruency of donations with the firm's core business, effort exerted by the firm, and commitment of the firm to the cause. We employed an experiment to test our expectations across two retail contexts: grocery and building supply stores. Across both stores, respondent evaluations were more positive for disaster-related as compared to ongoing causes, and for donations involving greater effort (i.e., product rather than cash contributions). There were no differences in evaluations related to the firm's degree of commitment (i.e., the retailer matching vs. not matching consumers' donations). This was surprising because the greater commitment condition doubled the contribution to the cause. Differences between stores were found for congruency of the donated product with the retailer's core business. For grocery stores, there was no difference; however for the building supply store, consumers rated the incongruent product donation (i.e., food and cleaning supplies) more positively than the congruent donation (i.e., building supplies).