Cause Marketing Research Directory
The curated Cause Marketing Research Directory highlights statistically-valid findings, summarized for marketing executives and directors of corporate social responsibility. Research paper reviews include abstracts and key lessons learned, focused on the cause marketing implications.
Select any category to browse research on that topic:
- Audience: Community, Customers, Employees, Investors, Media, Policymakers
- Business Goal: Advocacy, Defense, Goodwill, Premium Pricing, Recruiting, Sales
- Cause: Animal Welfare, Crisis Response, Environment, Health, Neighborhood, Overseas, Poverty
- Custom:
- Industry: Consumer Packaged Goods, Controversial, Durable Goods, Restaurants and Hospitality, Retail, Sports and Entertainment
- Tactics: Checkout Donations, Experiential Marketing, Incentivized Behavior Change, Media Relations, Message Testing, Product-Cause Fit, Social Media, Sustainable Business Practices, You buy. We’ll give.
Note: As we present Cause Marketing lessons learned, we try to not confuse correlation with causation.
For instance, imagine that a department store sells 20% more umbrellas on the day that the store offers to donate $1 for each umbrella sold. Does the 20% increase in umbrella sales demonstrate the efficacy of cause marketing? Not necessarily, especially if you also take into account that there was a powerful rainstorm on the day that umbrella sales increased. So in that case, even though cause marketing was correlated with a 20% increase in umbrella sales, it’s more likely that the actual cause of the increase in umbrella sales was the powerful rainstorm.
To avoid that kind of spurious correlation, we curate research which isolates the actual impact of cause marketing, using a principle which scientists refer to by the Latin phrase ceteris paribus, meaning everything else being equal.