The Influence Of Consumer Prosocial Level And Prosocial Reasoning On The Participation Intention Of Cause-related Marketing

In recent years,cause-related marketing has become an important strategy for companies to increase their business value.Most of the current researches on factors affecting the cause-related marketing effectiveness are carried out from the perspective of the company,such as: corporate social responsibility,corporate cause-event matching,and so on.However,the effectiveness of cause-related marketing depends fundamentally on the participation of consumers.Therefore,it is necessary to explore the influence of cause-related marketing participation from the perspective of consumers.The current research results have been discussed from the aspects of consumer equity perception,self-construal,power distance,etc.However,there is no literature to explore the factors affecting the marketing participation of cause-related marketing from the perspective of consumer prosocial theory,although cause-related marketing have very typical pro-social attributes.Generalized cause-related marketing refers to the company’s ethical and social responsibility based on the needs of various stakeholders.Social,environmental and non-profit organizations will benefit from this.Cause-related marketing is up to the social expectations,and has very typical prosocial attributes compared to other marketing models.The theory of prosocial behavior shows that when individuals have higher prosocial levels,they will pay more attention to the benefit of others,and pay attention to behavioral outcomes,which will significantly affect the prosocial behavior of individuals.The theory of well-being shows that consumers will have a strong sense of eudaimonic well-being in the process of participating in prosocial behavior,which is the psychological demand performance of consumers willing to participate in prosocial activities.Based on this,this paper first explores the influence of the prosocial level of consumers on their cause-related marketing participation intentions,and demonstrates the mediating role of consumer eudaimonic well-beingWhat needs to be clear is that the target consumer group of the enterprise who implements marketing should have higher-prosocial level(hereinafter referred to as a pro-social consumer),which has a higher possibility of prosocial participation.But do all pro-social consumers have a higher level of participation in all types of cause-related marketing? The conclusions of Eisenberg et al.on prosocial reasoning indicate that individuals with different types of prosocial reasoning have prosocial behavior type preferences.For example,individuals with the type of reasoning of others’ needs are more willing to make spontaneous sharing and helping behaviors.Therefore,considering the prosocial nature of cause-related marketing itself,we believe that prosocial consumers of different prosocial reasoning types have different intentions to participate in different types of cause-related marketing.Based on this,the purpose of this paper is to explore the prosocial factors of consumers which influence the cause-related marketing participation intentions based on the theory of cause-related marketing,pro-social theory and wellbeing theory.Before the beginning of the formal research,this paper based on the theory of prosocial reasoning and the type of prosocial behavior,through the focus interview and situation testing,identified four common types of cause-related marketing;namely,self-benefit cause-related marketing,others benefit cause-related marketing,social normative cause-related marketing;self-normative cause-related marketing.Subsequently,the study collected experimental data through experimental methods and questionnaires,and measured the constructs of consumer prosocial level,prosocial reasoning type,eudaimonic well-being,and participation intention in four different types of causerelated marketing situations.After eliminating the invalid samples,a total of 312 valid data were collected,and the hypothesis test was performed using software such as spss and excel.The research shows that: 1.consumer prosocial level will affect his participation intention in cause-related marketing;2.eudaimonic well-being plays a mediating role in the influence of consumer prosocial level on cause-related marketing participation intention;3 pro-social consumers’ prosocial reasoning types influencing the participation intentions of different types of cause-related marketing,specifically:(1)pro-social consumers of hedonic reasoning have stronger intentions to participate in the self-benefit cause-related marketing;(2)pro-social Consumers with other people’s demand reasoning have a stronger intention to participate in others benefit cause-related marketing;(3)pro-social consumers of internalized value reasoning have stronger intentions to participate in s self-normative cause-related marketing;(4)but “pro-social consumers of stereotyped reasoning have stronger intentions to participate in social normative cause-related marketing” is not verified.This may be related to the behavioral preference of consumers in stereotyped reasoning,which is determined by social norms.Because of the prosociality and positive social normative nature of marketing activities,it blurs the stereotyped reasoning consumers’ cognition.In the study of prosocial behavior theory,in addition to individual cognitive factors,the influence of individual emotional factors is often discussed,especially the role of sympathy.The above-mentioned prosocial level and prosocial reasoning are the consumer influence sounds of cognitive perspective.Similarly,this paper will borrow the relevant theoretical research on sympathy affecting prosocial behavior,and explore the influence of sympathy on consumer’s participation intentions of cause-related marketing.The results show that the stronger the consumer’s sympathy,the stronger the intention of marketing participation,and the consumer eudaimonic well-being also plays a mediating role.In addition,this paper also explores the stimulating strategy of cause-related marketing.For traditional marketing methods,material reward is a good stimulating strategy,but the research results of this paper show that,unlike traditional marketing strategy,the intention of consumer to participate cause-related marketing is not affected by material rewards.The self-determination theory is a good explanation for this: Consumers are involved in cause-related marketing driven by internal motivation rather than external motivations such as rewards.Based on the theoretical research related to cause-related marketing and prosocial behavior,this paper emphasizes the importance of studying the factors affecting the participation intention of cause-related marketing from the perspective of consumers.In the theoretical sense,the current research proved that the consumers’ prosocial level will affect their participation intention of the cause-related marketing and the consumer eudaimonic well-being plays a mediating role.It also shows that as the target customer group of the company’s cause-related marketing,the prosocial consumers with different types of prosocial reasoning show different participation intentions to different types cause-related marketing,which enriches the cause-related marketing research from consumer perspective.In the practical sense,the company proposes a further group segmentation method for the target pro-social consumers,so that the company can provide more matching cause-marketing activities for pro-social consumers of different reasoning types,and let enterprises choose different marketing strategies according to their own positioning and product advantages.