Touch The Heart and The Head Will Follow: Marketing The Good Initiative

The purchasing habit of today’s consumer seems to shift from the previous years. Today, our consumer tends to be more concerned about the effect of company operational activities toward others. As the issue of corporate social responsibility is rising, most consumer believe that if they buy product from company that applies corporate social responsibility program, thus they also already contribute to do good thing for others. Up to this point, the concept of good initiative marketing or also been recognised by good cause purchase becomes a pivotal point to see whether company with good initiative may have the bigger opportunity to win the heart of our today’s consumer.

We conduct a survey toward 1.114 respondents in our panel to understand about their perception of good cause marketing. Several aspects that will be examined in this survey are respondent’s awareness about good cause marketing, their knowledge, their experience of it, and their interest to purchase product from challenging brand.

The highlight of our finding show that the good cause purchase concept is not quite familiar among our respondent in this survey, although in fact some of them are correctly understand the meaning of the concept. Moreover, respondents’ interest to buy product from brand that apply good cause marketing initiatives seems promising in the near future.

As we previously mention, most respondents in this survey do not familiar with the concept of good cause marketing. Only 32% respondents in this survey ever hear about the concept and understand it as the marketing activity from company in the form of profit donation for charity.

In general, we would like to focus our survey into two product categories such as fast food and body care. Both product categories are chosen due to their familiarity to be consumed and/or used by respondent, as well as the potential of both categories to face any good cause related issue. In a brief illustration, the fast food product category is closely associated as selling junk food product that endanger their consumer health. Moreover, the body care product category is considered as participating in the animal cruelty issue due to their animal testing process.

Respondent’s concern about good cause marketing issue is reflected as well in our finding as 61% of them are willing to pay extra for buying good cause marketed product. However, regarding the supported cause by the brand, most respondents in this survey consider education, environment, and health as the leading issues they most concern about.

As the old proverb that once said “touch the heart, and the head will follow”, doing good cause marketing will benefit the brand in some aspects. At first, the increasing positive images of the brand that conduct good cause marketing. It will also lead to the higher trust toward brand quality, as well as respondent’s willingness to recommend the brand to others.

The way respondent praise the brand that conduct good cause marketing also enlarge the opportunity to reach potential buyer in the future. Most respondents in this survey say that they will recommend the brand to their family and friends, while we know that words of mouth from our closes acquaintance is the most powerful marketing communication tool.

In fact, the application of good cause marketing concept could be done in several programs. However, most respondents in this survey find product transaction with certain profit donation as the most interesting program. Besides that, our respondents are like to participate in the charity event as another form of good cause marketing program.

We further ask about respondents’ interest to buy product from certain brand that face several issues. At the first issue, we ask our respondent whether they are willing to buy any product from brand that is known as containing dangerous ingredients. As we predict, the result show that 90% respondent will not buy any of it.

We further ask our respondent about their willingness to buy product from brand that is known as dangerously processed. There is 95% respondents in this survey who say that they will not buy any of it.

Support for the small-business or local supplier seems to be another concern for most respondents in this survey. 91% respondents will buy product from brand that implement fair trade program in their operational activities.

Strong concern about fair trade activity is strongly shown as well in the survey result since our respondents seems to put their attentions as well in the trafficking issue. The low paid labour, illegal labour, and child labour as several trafficking issues become are concerned by our respondent. 89% respondents in this survey will not buy any product from brand that involved in trafficking issue.

At last, we ask our respondent to tell their buying experience by mentioning good cause marketing brand that they ever bought. Although at the first time the main focus of this survey is subjected to fast food and body care product category, but it seems like other categories are more popular among our respondents. Regarding their buying experience, respondent mention several brands such as Aqua, Pepsodent, KFC, and The Body Shop as their supported brand who conduct good cause marketing program.

For more detail you can download XLS report at the button below (Bahasa Indonesia). JAKPAT report consists of 3 parts which are 1) Respondent Profile, 2) Crosstabulation for each question and 3) Raw Data. Respondent profile shows you demographic profiles ( gender,age range, location by province, and monthly spending). Cross tabulation enables you to define different demographic segment preference on each answer.