Research Of Cause-related Marketing's Impact On Internet Users' Brand Attitude And Purchase Intent

As an innovative marketing approach,CRM effectively combines companies' social responsibility with marketing activities.It significantly changes the running costs to economic interests,promoting development of companies and society.With the transformation of consuming concepts,CRM has become one of the most important strategies for company to establish image and expand reputation.Companies in China also start to adopt CRM strategy in practice,but most of them failed to gain expected benefits.According to existing research,most scholars agree that CRM can have an impact on companies'interests,but there isn't a unified conclusion on what factors influence the benefits of CRM.In such context,we take internet users as obj ect,empirically analyzing what factors of CRM affect the mainstream consumer group with high cultural level,strong interactive sociality and caring about social environment.In our research,we choose eight factors including users,attitude towards cause,users' perception of CRM motivation,users'engagement,companies' credibility,cause's duration,causes' domain,online connection strength and donating ways as independent variables,brand attitude as intermediate variable,users' purchasing intent as dependent variable,analyzing independent variables' direct impact on dependent variable and intermediate variable's indirect impact on dependent variable.We measure the brand attitude by two dimensions including emotion and recognition.We analyze the questionnaire data with SPSS 23.0 and AMOS 21.0 software and find that except companies'donation,factors including users'attitude towards cause,users,engagement,companies'credibility,cause's duration can have direct or indirect influence on users' purchasing intent.For factors influencing users' brand attitude,online connection strength has the greatest impact on recognitive brand attitude while users'engagement has the greatest impact on emotional brand attitude.Users'engagement,companies' credibility,online connection strength can directly or indirectly influence users' purchasing intent while users'attitude towards cause,users' perception of CRM motivation,cause's duration,causes' domain can only indirectly influence users' purchasing intent by users' brand attitude.Based on those results,in order to improve benefits of CRM,we propose practical suggestions of improving companies' credibility,selecting high involvement products and improving online connection strength of communities.