Societal marketing activities, including cause-related marketing, benefit firms by improving brand image and reputation and increasing sales. Therefore, demand for societal marketing has been growing. Overall, expenses on societal marketing activities ...
Societal marketing activities, including cause-related marketing, benefit firms by improving brand image and reputation and increasing sales. Therefore, demand for societal marketing has been growing. Overall, expenses on societal marketing activities have been rising, and concurrently, investments in and usage of cause-related marketing are also increasing. Although companies carry out societal marketing activities in various cultural regions, prior research has been predominantly conducted in a specific cultural area—the West. Some studies adopted a comparative approach; however, most of them compared the regions only in Western and Eastern contexts. Such studies based on the differences between Western and Eastern cultures, therefore, considered Asian countries as a uniform cultural area. However, each country in Asia has traditional and unique cultural traits and presents different consumer behaviors. To address this limitation in the literature, the present study explores societal marketing in the Asian market. Specifically, we examine Korea and China because these two countries are included in Asian culture yet are quite different from each other. In this study, we explore societal marketing in the Asian market by considering these two countries as representatives of distinct aspects of this market. China has become the largest market in the world with significant growth potential. In China, many firms are increasing their investment in societal marketing activities to attract the Chinese consumers. However, academic research is lacking, so they have difficulty in establishing appropriate strategies. Therefore, this study compares consumer responses toward societal marketing between Chinese and Korean consumers and provides strategic guidelines for practitioners.
Unlike other societal marketing activities, cause-related marketing is based on consumer purchase behavior; therefore, strategies for cause-related marketing should be different from those for other activities. A consumer is important as both a buyer and a donor. Therefore, this study explores consumer response toward cause-related marketing from psychological and economic viewpoints. Specifically, this study considers that consumers perceive not only emotional benefits, such as moral satisfaction, but also cost burden when they purchase a cause-related product. The effect of message frames is examined from the consumers’ perception of benefit and cost. Our analysis confirmed that Korean and Chinese consumers showed varying responses to cause-related marketing by message frames. Additionally, we investigate the responses from regional consumers in China because each region of the country has a specific economic and cultural profile. We observed that coastal region consumers showed different responses compared with inland consumers. We emphasize the need for further research that disregards the narrow viewpoint of considering Korea and China as a single Asian market. Further, the current research proposes valuable implications for national and global companies in Korea and China.