An Experimental Examination of Framing Effects on Consumer Response to Cause Marketing Campaigns

Consumer decision-making is contextual and is heavily influenced by what is considered to be personally relevant. Cause marketing creates a context for social activism by inducing prosocial behaviour in consumers; however, not all consumers find every social issue relevant to their interests, values and goals. Marketers use messaging strategies to convey the importance of a social issue and make it seem relevant enough to motivate consumers to behave in a desirable way. This research examines the effects of message framing in cause marketing campaigns by identifying the role that positive and negative framing play in influencing consumer response based on the degree of relevance they have towards the cause. An experiment using fictitious brands in a cause marketing campaign revealed that framing and relevance have an impact on consumer response to such campaigns, in that negatively farmed messages served as an effective cue to influence attitude and participation intention. Consumers who found the issue to be highly personally relevant had more favourable attitudes and participation intentions than those for whom the cause was not personally relevant. An Interaction of message framing and cause relevance revealed that negative framing impacted the participation intentions of consumers who find a social issue to be of less relevance, while for those who believed the social issue to be of high relevance, message framing did not influence behavioural intentions.