With the high frequency and intensity of worldwide disasters, cause-related marketing campaigns with sudden disasters are becoming increasingly popular. However, little is known about whether and how cause acuteness may influence consumer attitudes. This research aims to extend this research area through investigating the relationship between cause acuteness and consumer attitudes toward the product, as well as its underlying mechanism and boundary conditions. Based on a moral psychology perspective, we propose a theoretical model focusing on the mediating role of moral (...) elevation in influencing consumer attitudes. This model also incorporates product-cause fit and information transparency as moderators underpinning necessary conditions that are likely to lead to positive consumer attitudes. Four empirical studies were conducted to test our model. Our research results reveal that consumers have more positive attitudes toward the product associated with a sudden disaster than with an ongoing tragedy. Furthermore, the positive effect of cause acuteness on consumer attitudes is mediated by enhanced moral elevation, which occurs under the conditions of high product-cause fit and high information transparency. (shrink)

Motivated by controversies surrounding the continued employment of poverty porn in humanitarian business, we initiated two 2 × 2 × 2 experiments to examine the extent to which humanitarian ads that utilize poverty porn images weaponize fundraising. Informed by negative state relief and Affect Intensity Theory, the two investigations explored the effects on study participants of the inclusion within ad appeals of images of starving children, ad spokespeople of disparate gender and ethnicity, and different types of message frame. A 2 (...) (protest emotive vs. informative message) × 2 (male vs. female announcer) × 2 (White British or Black African ethnicity) between-subjects eye track experiment ( n = 236) revealed that an informative message with a White female announcer attracted the most attention. Next, a survey ( n = 667) was completed, which recorded participants’ levels of affect intensity, advertising skepticism, and donation intention. The results suggested that a White British female announcer was more likely to engage potential donors than a male and/or non-White spokesperson. The implications of the findings are discussed in light of how poverty porn might work in practice. (shrink)

In its three decades of development, many constructs of cause-related marketing have been tested from different perspectives and in varied contexts. However, there has not yet been an integrated empirical study. Reviewing 162 studies from 117 articles, we constructed a framework of meta-analysis and identified 20 constructs. Among these, 13 are antecedents that can be grouped into three components: consumer-related traits, execution-related factors, and product-related traits, while three mediators and four consequences are used to measure the effectiveness of cause-related marketing. (...) Moreover, we examined 857 relationships among the constructs. The results showed that consumer-related traits, execution-related factors, and product-related traits all influence the effectiveness of cause-related marketing to varying degrees. Furthermore, we analyzed the effects of six moderators and found that cause-related marketing would be more effective when the brand is familiar, the product is utilitarian, the donation magnitude is large, and the cause is less familiar. However, neither cultural orientation nor cause type significantly influences the effectiveness of cause-related marketing. Finally, the interactions between these moderators and execution-related antecedents provide contributions and implications for cause-related marketing. (shrink)

Communication, as a discipline that generates a rich body of literature on CSR, has become a critical contributor to CSR knowledge in social science. However, limited research exists to understand how CSR knowledge is constructed and diffused in the discipline. This study thus intends to unpack the knowledge construction process of CSR research in the communication discipline from a network perspective. Invisible college was adopted as the conceptual framework. Article and theory/concept networks were constructed with 290 peer-reviewed articles from 61 (...) communication journals between 1980 and 2018. Results showed that in the past four decades, CSR literature in communication has been growing and maturing, as evidenced by the increasing volume and diversity of theories and concepts applied. Furthermore, this body of literature tends to gravitate toward certain selected groups of theories and concepts, resulting in denser article networks over time. Our findings reflected a substantial influence of management and psychological perspectives on CSR research in communication. Additionally, the results showed that public relations concepts and theories have influenced CSR research across different communication subfields such as advertising and organization communication. The study expects the continuation of the plurality of voices as to how communication researchers will approach CSR and what specific topics may gain popularity in future research. (shrink)