بازاریابی علی

The research aims to investigate the effect of awareness of the brand connection with a charity, trust in the charity, charity's reputation, and consumers' perception of effectiveness in improving the cause, on the behavioral intentions of buyers.

The research was conducted using a quasi-experimental method (a pre-test-post-test design) in two experimental groups (Mahak and Imam Khomeini Relief Committee (RA)) in cyberspace. First, the participants watched a 74-second promotional video of Ehsan brand products (without mentioning the charity and only focused on the variety and quality of the products) and answered the questions related to the intention to buy the brand and recommend it to others. Then, by showing a printed ad, they learned about the brand's connection to one of the charities. then, the willingness to buy and the intention to recommend, as well as the participants' perception of effectiveness in improving the cause, trust in the charity, and the charity's reputation were measured again. Hypotheses were checked using the mean comparison test of dependent pairs and structural equation modeling.

Consumers' awareness of connecting the brand with charity strengthens positive behaviors such as willingness to buy and recommend the product to others. Also, when buyers feel that they can influence the improvement of the cause, the tendency to buy and recommend the brand increases. Not enough evidence was found to confirm the influence of charity reputation and charity trust on buyers' behaviors.

Linking a brand with a cause, known as cause related marketing, is one the methods of handling corporate social responsibility. It has attracted the attention of many companies due to its positive impact on customers’ behavior. In this method, charitable payments of the corporation are linked to the profitable financial transactions of customers as in donating money per purchase. Many different factors affect the formation of the cause related marketing campaign including the size of donation, charity type, product type, social reputation of the corporation, cause importance, geographical proximity of the cause, and etc. This Applied Development study is a descriptive survey research in terms of methodology, focusing on the product type, and aims to classify (group, sort) the existing products and to present a clustering format for customers in cause related marketing. In this regard, data from a 27 question (product) questionnaire which was distributed between 524 students of some of Tehran’s universities were scrutinized. The products are classified into 5 general groups of hedonic; essential; sanitary-therapeutic (health-care) products; housing and amenities; and digital products based on the exploratory factor analysis and a varimax orthogonal rotation of 27 factors of the study. Also, based on the presented K-means clustering, customers are clustered and labeled (Taxonomy) into 3 groups of altruists, product-based (including those focused on essential products-housing and amenities; and those focused on hedonic sanitary-therapeutic, and digital products), and distant customers.