Do Good, Sell More: Can Cause-Related Marketing Promotions Boost Product Sales?

Journal of Marketing Research Scholarly Insights are produced in partnership with the AMA Doctoral Students SIG – a shared interest network for Marketing PhD students across the world.

Have you ever considered using a small donation on product packaging to benefit your brand? Popular examples of this practice include, “buy a pack of toilet paper and the brand will donate 5 cents to the WWF” or “purchase a chocolate bar and 1.4 cents goes to UNICEF.” These promotional campaigns are known as Cause-Related Marketing Promotions (CMPs), which are designed to boost sales while supporting important causes of nonprofit organizations. Although these may seem small on the package, they are considerable investments for marketing managers. Beyond the donation, this promotion technique involves negotiation with the nonprofit organization as well as the redesign and reproduction of the packaging.

However, do CMPs actually drive sales, especially when they’re tucked away on a tiny part of the package? In addition, can they cut through the noise when consumers are faced with overwhelming product choices on grocery store shelves?

In a recent Journal of Marketing Research study, authors Christina Schamp, Mark Heitmann, Yuri Peers, and Peter Leeflang investigate the potency of CMPs in driving short-term sales in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) retail settings. By analyzing eight years of data covering 63 CMP campaigns across 20 product categories, their study provides the first comprehensive field analysis of how CMPs impact sales in real-world retail environments. Below are the main findings:

CMPs Increase Sales on Average

On average, CMPs produce a 4.9% weekly sales increase while donating 3.2% of the product price. CMPs typically run for 11 weeks, creating sustained growth without the post-promotion dip seen in traditional price promotion (PP).

Who Should Use CMPs

The analysis reveals a large heterogeneity among different CMP campaigns. As CMPs might be overlooked at the point of sale, sales effects can double for categories where consumers notice the brand for factors other than the CMP itself:

Category leaders
Brands priced below category average
Brands with fewer past price promotions
Brands in simpler markets (fewer SKUs or less price dispersion)

When the setting does not suffice for a brand to enter the consumer’s consideration set, a simultaneously executed price promotion can boost the CMPs’ sales effects. Specifically, a 10% price reduction increases the CMPs’ sales lift by an average of 6.64% over and above the main effect of the PP itself.

How to Make Your Next CMP Campaign More Impactful

For leading/low-priced brands: CMPs can work well on their own
For non-leading/higher-priced brands: Combine with price promotions
For all brands: time PPs and CMPs in parallel as opposed to subsequently

The logic behind this is simple: consumers can only respond to cause-related marketing that they actually notice. In crowded retail environments, shoppers quickly screen products using obvious cues, such as brand names and prices, so CMPs often go unnoticed unless the brand is already likely to be considered for other reasons. In other words, brands need to enter the consideration set to make CMPs work. CMPs do not drive the consideration set on their own.

“Brands need to enter the consideration set to make CMPs work. CMPs do not drive the consideration set on their own.”

Source: Lana Lauren/WU Marketing Department

We interviewed three of the authors to better understand the complex complementarity of CMPs and PPs and explore aspects of the research beyond what is reported in the article. Christina, Mark, and Yuri emphasized the role of price promotions in making CMPs a success in the FMCG sector, one of the largest and most diverse industries in terms of product categories, SKUs, and global turnover:

Q: What makes your research particularly valuable to both practitioners and researchers, and what surprising insights have emerged from it?

A: The main point of the paper is twofold. First, the average effect of CMPs is small, donations are modest, and sales gains are limited. Many brands do not repeat CMPs possibly because of insufficient economic returns. However, because these campaigns last longer than typical promotions, the total effect over time is not negligible. Other forms of promotion, such as price promotions, would experience diminishing effects over longer periods. Second, we found heterogeneity in CMP effects and studied why some cause-related marketing promotions work well while others do not. When you get it right, cause-related marketing has the potential of way higher effects than the average suggests.

Another special aspect of this study is that it tackles a phenomenon mainly studied in lab experiments, where the effects might appear larger than in the actual market. Rather than focusing on campaign design elements, it examines contextual factors such as pricing and competition—variables that are harder to test in lab settings but crucial for understanding what drives CMP success in the real world. With the actual data, we are able to study the actual economic returns of CMP.

Q: Typically, when brands run CMPs, they add to the marketing cost. Further adding PPs could end up hurting gains in the long run. Can brands boost their CMP performance with other marketing tactics, such as store positioning and in-store promotions?

A: We do not have data on marketing tactics, such as store positioning or in-store promotions, but our evidence suggests that improving product visibility and consumer consideration would theoretically enhance CMP effects. We find that price promotions are particularly effective in ensuring consumer consideration. At first sight, they might seem like a conceptual mismatch that appeals to egoistic consumer motives rather than the altruistic motives CMP relates to. However, consideration is critical to ensure that CMPs do not pass unnoticed limits. Combining these factors creates a synergistic benefit. Note that the additional CMP effect due to price promotions comes at the top of the regular price promotion effect. Importantly, we also do not observe post-promotional dips with CMPs; once customers buy because of cause-related marketing, their sales levels do not fall below regular sales. Since brands typically need to work with retailers to conduct price promotions while CMPs are fully under their control, we recommend better coordination and timing. If you are doing both promotions anyway, align them for maximum benefit, rather than running them separately.

Q: Based on market evidence, do you think brands should take care of maintaining a logical match—like toilet paper brands supporting forest projects—to make their CMPs perform better, sales-wise?

A: Empirically, fit as a moderator is difficult to objectively code in hindsight. For example, a German beer brand donated to rainforest conservation. While this might not seem to be a high fit, advertising and brand positioning might influence fit perceptions over time and suggest otherwise to consumers. A cause-related marketing meta-analysis (Schamp et al., 2023) found that fit is one of the most researched phenomena in lab settings; however, it has only a small effect on consumer response. In a preliminary analysis based on subjective coding of fit, we found similar small effects of fit but did not include them in the paper due to interpretational challenges. Conceptually and based on our findings, we would expect factors such as visibility, concurrent price promotions, and being a leading brand to play a more dominant role than fit, which individual consumers might perceive very differently. Also note that until now, there has not been much competition in terms of simultaneous CMP campaigns in one category in a given time, which might help to make fit considerations more salient.

From an NGO perspective, this could be good news. It might very well open up many more possible collaborations, such as the beer brand’s effort for rainforest conservation, that marketers might otherwise rule out due to concerns about a possible lack of fit. When negotiating with brands, we further recommend that NGOs focus on the duration of the campaign rather than just the donation amount. Since we see a constant weekly sales lift over the campaign period, focusing on campaign length creates a win-win for both brands and nonprofits.

Q: This study focuses on the FMCG sector, which has its own challenges. What kind of sales boost do you expect other product sectors to focus on CMPs such as apparel, cosmetics, and electronics?

A: One of the reasons we studied the FMCG sector was its one-of-a-kind nature. FMCG is roughly 14 trillion USD in global industry, marking about 10% of the global economy. This is important not only from an industry perspective but also from an NGO awareness perspective. Pretty much all of us go grocery shopping. Running the right collaboration with leading brands, brands with attractive price positions, or those willing to add price promotions has a good chance of reaching many people who might be interested in supporting charitable causes but due to different reasons might fail to do so otherwise.

While we lack data, we could try to draw some logical conclusions from our findings regarding other industries. For example, in electronics, Apple is a well-recognized brand; therefore, if they run a reasonable CMP, they would have a good chance of making a sizeable impact. Conversely, one of the many USB drive brands on Amazon risks smaller effects because CMPs do not attract consideration on their own. Therefore, in terms of generalization, we would not be able to differentiate industries but would think more about the actual shopping experiences and the complexity of consumers’ decision-making processes. Whenever consumers apply consideration-then-choice decision making, several factors such as the ones we observed should help CMPs boost sales and promote ethical consumerism. Of course, other factors not part of our investigation could play an additional role in other categories and would need to be considered in addition to these considerations.

Q: Some of the data are more than 10 years old, and consumer consumption has changed considerably since then in terms of increased digital retail and consumers’ rising awareness about societal issues. If this study were done today, what could be the possible differences in the results?

A: To investigate this, we controlled for time effects within our dataset and did not observe a strong shift in CMP effectiveness over time. Moreover, other ongoing projects have shown similar effect sizes. Regarding the role of consideration, we do not expect this to change over time. However, it is important to distinguish temporary cause-related marketing promotions specifically designed to boost short-term sales from brand positioning around ethical consumerism or corporate social responsibility (CSR). When any regular brand adds CMPs, consumers can only find them once they inspect these brands in more detail. However, ethically conscious consumers are often aware of sustainable brands and are likely to consider these without the need for additional price promotions or the necessity of being a market-leading brand. These brands may have profited from the rising awareness of societal issues. Note that very recently, the attention to CSR may have slowed somewhat, but as Forbes notes, “sustainability isn’t in a recession; it’s graduating from high school.” More brands are adopting these approaches and consumers are becoming more selective, requiring brands to be more informed about CSR execution and point-of-sale communications. A similar study of long-term CSR might shed further light on when and how to excite consumers with CSR.