Unveiling the impact of donation message-framing, donation magnitude, and product type (vice: hedonic vs. virtue: utilitarian) on CRM participation intention

Abstract

Business organizations integrate their marketing promotional activities with the fundraising requirements of non-profit organizations (NPOs). Cause-related marketing (CRM) denotes charitable donations contingent on consumers purchasing a product by endorsing a social cause linked to an NPO. While the non-profit marketing literature primarily focuses on donation intentions, empirical evidence on Gen Z’s CRM participation intention from an emerging market perspective remains inadequate. This study incorporates two experiments to investigate the impact of donation message-framing, donation magnitude, and product type on CRM participation intention. This study paves the way for managing CRM initiatives more effectively regarding planning and implementation amongst Gen Z consumers. The exact donation message-framing format in CRM was found to have a greater preference among Gen Z consumers when buying either product type, i.e. vice (hedonic) or virtue (utilitarian). Moreover, the results indicated that vague donation message framing and smaller donation magnitude had negligible appeal on the CRM-associated purchase of both vice and virtue product types. This study offers insightful predictions for NPOs and significant grounds for CRM decision-makers to augment the structure of the promotional campaigns and further solicit charitable donations from Gen Z consumers. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2025.