Cause Related Marketing: A substitute for direct donations?

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Chapter1. Introduction:
In the new global economy, marketing has become a central issue for increasing the market share in many saturated, hypercompetitive markets. The oversupply of goods and their providers forces organisations to distinguish themselves from each other as much as possible with many different marketing instruments. The more saturated a market is, the higher are the costs of gaining market share via the use of a marketing instrument (Cooper andamp; Kaplan, 1988). New marketing methods and instruments have thus been increasingly researched and implemented over the last decades. Up-to-date marketing instruments hence can provide a price worthy and effective tool to increase market share if implemented quickly and executed correctly.
One of the newest marketing tools is called Cause-Related Marketing. It implies that a profit-oriented company teams-up with a non-governmental organisation (NGO) to project the positive perception of the NGO by customers upon the brand image of the profit-oriented organisation (Varadarajan andamp; Menon, 1988). If a company now openly communicates the partnership in order to create a better image which ultimately should lead to higher sales figures, it is engaging in Cause Related Marketing (CRM) (Adkins, 1999). CRM is considered as one of the most important marketing tools in terms of companies influencing potential customers (Barone, et al., 2010), but is also considered to be the most sensitive in terms of campaign failure (Pracejus andamp; Douglas Olsen, 2004). It is further argued that it has been one of the fastest-growing marketing instruments worldwide (Independent Evaluation Group, 2009).
The saturated markets, high competition and the need for new marketing instruments show the relevance of CRM as one of the big contemporary marketing approaches. However, not all possibilities and risks have been assessed. So far, no research has surveyed the probabilities and the hence inherited potential of

Johannes Sebastian Siebert was born in Penzberg, Germany in 1984. After his apprentice ship as a sales man he started to study Business and Management at the University of Applied Science in Kufstein, Austria in 2010. He obtained his masters degree 2010 in the field of Business and Management with the grade Merit at the Aston Business School in Birmingham, United Kingdom. After his intense travels throughout South America, Central- and South East Asia he discovered that many European brands support causes in the developing countries he has visited.This triggered his interest in the potential of Cause Related Marketing as a tool of to improve the customer s perception of a corporate brand.Finally, the lack of literature and studies in this new and partially unexplored niche of marketing triggered his wish to contribute to the topic.His study got awarded with the grade Distinction .