Cause-Related Marketing & Millennials’ Purchase Intention: Sequential Mediation of Emotional Arousal and Altruistic Motivation

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Cause-related marketing (CRM) has grown in recent years as it significantly impacts businesses, charitable organizations, and customers. CRM is beneficial for any organization in two ways. First, it develops a positive image of the organization being socially responsible and gets easily differentiated among its competitors. Secondly, being emotionally loaded with a social cause, CRM grasps more attention among its existing and potential customers. It ultimately increases sales and builds brand equity. Keeping in view the importance of CRM, especially in the context of Pakistani young customers (millennials), this research aims to investigate how CRM transforms into purchase intention through emotional arousal and altruistic motivation using Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) Model. Using convenience sampling, data was collected from 311 generation Y (millennials) customers from Pakistan. Smart PLS was used to analyze direct and indirect relationships among variables. Results indicate that emotional arousal partially mediates between CRM and purchase intention. Similarly, Emotional arousal also partially mediates between CRM and altruistic motivation. On the other hand, no mediation effect of altruistic motivation was found between CRM and purchase intention. Altruistic motivation didn’t also mediate between emotional arousal and purchase intention. Finally, the sequential mediation effect of emotional arousal and altruistic motivation between CRM and purchase intention was also found insignificant.  The study suggests that organizations should advertise their products in collaboration with different NGOs in order to get maximum purchases. Furthermore, CRM campaigns should focus more on the emotional arousal of customers. Finally, policies should be devised at the government level that encourages companies to market their products based on social causes benefitting the nation.