Science behind Digital Cause Marketing
By: Sagar Grover
Tags: Social Media, Growth Hacking, Social Media Marketing, Brand Warmth, Acquisition

Doing good while doing good business makes great sense!



Every brand you come across, no matter how big or small, is trying to crack social media. Looking for that one campaign that might glorify brand image, go viral or maybe bring down CAC average to a much more profitable number.

7 out of 10 people I meet are working in so called “Social Media Marketing” but as Seth Godin says — there’s a huge difference between people working in marketing and marketers. Thus, before jumping to why cause marketing makes great sense, we must understand what MARKETERS actually think of social media.

User’s Motive

Consumers aim to signal their own identity by engaging with brands online. In doing so, consumers endorse these brands.

Brand’s Motive

Marketers are increasingly trying to engage consumers in attempts to spread the word about their brand. Using other consumers as a source of persuasive communication is one of the strongest ways to overcome user resistance towards commercial ads.

But are consumers’ online brand endorsements a feasible marketing strategy for all brands, or do brands differ with regard to their inherent potential to acquire online endorsements from their consumers?

A quick google search will lead you to dozens of marketing blogs talking about user behavior on social media; about design features of posting, click bait psychology, impression management, funnel optimization etc. But surprisingly nobody’s talking about the brand related drivers of consumer’s tendency to endorse brands on social media.



Some quick points about user brand relation on social media.

“Consumers’ brand relationships are in many ways similar to interpersonal relationships” #Fournier 1998

“Consumers have a tendency to anthropomorphize brands and perceive them as somehow human-like entities that have their own motivations and intentions.”#Aggarwal and McGill 2007 #Epley, Waytz, and Cacioppo 2007

“Consumers deliberately use brands on Facebook to manage and create their self-identities”#Hollenbeck and Kaikati 2012

Just like human relations, consumer’s perception of brands map onto two main dimensions: Warmth and Competence. Going more social media specific, we must understand that brand warmth is the main driving factor behind consumer psychology.

This results in more interaction in case of “WARM” gestures, an advantage for cause campaigns (example), cause branded products (example) and showcase of socially conscious habits, over conventional acquisition campaigns, because the former are perceived as more warm. Identity signaling plays an important role in consumers’ decision to like brands on Social Media.

Simply put, consumer’s perceptions of for-profit gestures primarily map onto the competence dimension whereas perceptions of socially conscience gestures generally map onto the warmth dimension. Consumers who seek to express their (desired) identity, liking socially conscious gestures would be an easy and most effective way to make a favorable (first) impression. For any or all of these reasons, the social benefits of liking warm gestures will almost always be higher than the social benefits of liking for-profit gestures.



This blog is inspired by Stefan F. Bernrittera, Peeter W.J. Verleghb and Edith G. Smita’s paper: Why Nonprofits Are Easier to Endorse on Social Media. Available online here. Through a series of seven real time user brand interaction experiments, the paper hypothesized the following

-Consumers will be more likely to endorse nonprofit brands than for-profit brands on social media.

-Perceptions of warmth and competence of a brand will have a positive effect on consumers’ intention to endorse the brand on social media, but the effect of warmth is stronger than that of competence.

-The perceived warmth of a brand will mediate the effect of type of the brand (nonprofit vs. for-profit) on consumers’ intention to endorse a brand on social media.

-The effect of warmth on consumers’ intention to endorse brands on social media will be stronger for highly symbolic brands than for brands with low symbolic value.