The Effect Of Charity Marketing On Consumer Decision Making

The increasingly fierce competition prompts companies to innovate ways of marketing, and then charity marketing comes to people’s eyesight because it can not only promote the development of social welfare but also bring reputation spread and performance improvement, therefore, charity marketing will be a win-win strategy if it is devised and executed properly. Cause-Related Marketing (CRM) is a major type of charity marketing, which combines companies’performance and charity marketing and has been an important research area. With the diversification and facilitation of social communication and more attention being paid to charity marketing, companies must invest more in charity marketing.Questionnaire and behavior experiment were two traditional research methods on charity marketing, which had an innate defect that cannot reveal the cognitive and psychological process of consumers’ attitude towards charity marketing. However, the development of cognitive neuroscience has successfully solved this problem.By simulating a simplified consumer supermarket shopping scene, we developed two ERP experiments to study how charity marketing and enterprise commitments influence consumers’ purchase decisions and the relevant difference of behavioral and neural mechanisms. Based on the analysis of behavioral data and EEG data, we have drawn four conclusions as follows:(1) Both charity and commitments have positive effect on consumers’purchase decision. The former means that consumers are more willing to purchase from companies with charity marketing, while the latter reflects that consumers tends to choose companies with commitments of no price increase.(2) In the early stage of cognitive process, charity factor and commitment factor attract more attention resource, and as a result induced greater amplitude of P2component when reflected in event-related potential.(3) Consumers are sensitive to risk in purchase decision-making process, and when buying from supermarket with charity marketing or commitment of no price change, greater cognitive conflicts will be induced. (4) Compared with C2and C3condition (no difference in charity marketing or price commitment between different companies), the cognitive conflicts are greater in C1condition (difference concerning charity marketing or price commitment existed between different companies).