Cause Related Marketing

Executive Summary

"Everything is connected to everything else" is often called the First Law of Ecology. We through the medium of this paper try to draw out significant conclusions about the benefits- economical, social and environmental by looking towards Cause Related Marketing (CRM) from the business perspective. The need for such a perspective is drawn by intensified competition and clutter created in the consumers mind.

We then link CRM with the consumer behavior and their decision making process and find out the ‘attack-points’ and how CRM can be effectively used to create and/or enhance Brand Equity of any organization.

After this we define the levels of social involvement that Cause Marketing exposes and how it all relates to the bottom line of the organization as well as snugly fits into the society.

To understand the nuances of CRM a secondary research is carried out that reveals that CRM impacts females more along with the ‘Gen Y’ who take the case of being socially responsible quite seriously.

A model is suggested to measure the effectiveness of any CRM initiative and the typical processes that need to be taken into perspective at all stages- Pre-Event, during the course of the Event and Post-Event.

Finally we end with the future suggestions and trends that may lead to the proliferation of CRM and aspects that we may see in the future.

Truly, there are two laws that we had better take to be absolute. The first is that as we cannot exempt ourselves from living in this world, then if we wish to live, we cannot exempt ourselves from using the world. If we cannot exempt ourselves from use, then we must deal with the issues raised by use. And so the second law is that if we want to continue living, we cannot exempt use from care.