Increasing Consumers' Hypermarket Visit Intention through Cause-Related Marketing: A Perspective from the Theory of Planned Behaviour.
| Autor | Hong, Kay Tze |
1 Introduction
The Malaysian retail sector is recognised as being the main contributor to the nation's gross national income (GNI) and has transformed throughout the years from small traditional retail shops to large modern retail format stores, such as hypermarkets, supermarkets and department stores (PEMANDU, 2013). Although Malaysia has faced weak economic conditions, grocery retailing has remained strong in its value growth (Euromonitor International, 2014). The resilience of the retail sector under such economic conditions attracts many players and creates intense competition. Therefore, retailers, including hypermarkets, need to manage consumers' expectations more effectively to remain relevant.
Given the increased awareness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) in general, consumers have expected hypermarkets to start showing initiatives in CSR-related activities (Saeidi et al., 2015). CSR has innovatively emerged as part of a firm's marketing strategy by linking CSR activities to sales objectives; this is called cause-related marketing (CRM). CRM has been welcomed by companies because it has fulfilled consumers' expectations and improved company performance and reputation while helping a social cause (Sen & Bhattacharya, 2001). The applicability of CRM in the hypermarket context is under-reported. So far, CRM research has largely focused on specific retailers (Liu & Ko, 2011), such as chocolate manufacturers (Moosmayer & Fuljahn, 2010), fast-moving consumers goods (Patel et al., 2017), hotels (Boenigk & Schuchardt, 2015) and restaurants (Hanks et al., 2016).
This study on CRM differs from others in two ways. First, others have focused on social cause or product factors, such as the influence of the social cause category on consumer perceptions (Lafferty & Edmondson, 2014) and products of CRM with negative externalities possibly leading to unexpected effects (Grolleau et al., 2016). The literature that has looked at consumer and firm factors such as consumers' CRM attitude and the firm's CSR image is limited. Second, the research framework of CRM has so far focused on loose antecedents that directly affect CRM intention. In fact, many of these antecedents were factors that formed attitude towards CRM and attitude was reported to be the main driver of intention (Pookulangara et al., 2011), which is consistent with the proposal of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). TPB may serve as a theoretical basis to understand CRM antecedents more meaningfully, but its use in the CRM context is scarce. Therefore, this study closes the gap in the literature by testing the applicability of TPB in explaining consumers' CRM participation intention and hypermarket visit intention.
This study investigates the effectiveness of CRM in consumers' hypermarket visit intention using the TPB model. Its components, namely attitude, subjective norm (SN) and perceived behavioural control (PBC), are used to evaluate consumers' response to CRM and hypermarket visit intention. This study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it uses a novel social cause called "supporting underprivileged individuals", which has the ultimate aim of developing financially independent entrepreneurs. This social cause was created by this study based on suggestions from a focus group interview (forthcoming paper). The CRM literature has commonly focused on causes including diseases such as cancer (Robinson et al., 2012), wildlife and environmental causes such as the World Wildlife Fund and rainforest protection (Cheron et al., 2012), and the homeless (Chang, 2011).
The cause of supporting underprivileged individuals is relevant to a developing country like Malaysia as income distribution inequality is still high (The Star Online, 2013) and lower income groups need additional attention (The Star Online, 2016). Underprivileged individuals include single mothers, unskilled individuals and individuals that lack access to proper resources and food (Borneo Post Online, 2013; Malay Mail Online, 2016). By helping the underprivileged to support themselves, the country is also able to rise above the poverty line as a whole.
Second, the study contributes to the CRM literature by introducing a framework with a stronger theoretical background, that is, TPB. So far, CRM frameworks have not been rooted in a solid theoretical base. For example, most CRM studies have used multiple supporting theories, such as social identity theory (Vanhamme et al., 2012), attribution theory (Cui et al., 2003) and information integration theory (Samu & Wymer, 2009), to explain individual construct relationships with consumers' response to CRM. Third, the study extends the use of CRM to the hypermarket context. The applicability of CRM in the hypermarket context can provide valuable insights for hypermarket managers. The antecedents, namely altruistic firm motives (AFM), consumer--company identification (CCI), perceived CSR image (CSRI) and perceived company--cause fit (CCF), are hypothesised to influence attitudes towards CRM, which can help managers make informed decisions on CRM implementation.
2 Literature review
2.1 CSR and CRM
CSR is a tactic not only for fulfilling a company's moral obligation to the community, but also a way for the firm to align its interests with its stakeholders' to decrease risks and safeguard the continuity of the company's business (de Freitas Brandao et al., 2017). Patrus et al. (2013) asserted that a socially responsible company creates organizational values and seeks to improve the social conditions of people affected by its actions. Likewise, retailers that participate in CSR activities can positively enhance the relationship between retailer and customer (Potdar, Guthrie & Gnoth, 2018). CSR has been studied from many different perspectives and in contexts such as the relationship between CSR and employees' perceptions (e.g. Azim, 2016; de Freitas Brandao et al., 2017), the positive influence of ownership concentration on CSR (Crisostomo & Freire, 2015) and the relationship between consumers' CSR perception and social boycott (Cruz, 2017). This study focuses on the dimension of consumers' perceptions regarding the hypermarket's CSR initiatives (i.e. CRM) and its positive impact on consumers' hypermarket visit intention, because CRM is currently under-researched.
CRM is one of the CSR activities carried out by companies (Anuar & Mohamad, 2012). CRM is the focus of this study because it is recognised as the most creative, cost-effective and popular marketing strategy (Galan Ladero et al., 2015). Varadarajan and Menon (1988) defined CRM as an action that creates and employs marketing activities through the proposal that a firm donates a designated sum of funds to a chosen social cause in exchange for revenue-providing activities through purchase of the company's products or services. The increased adoption of CRM by many organizations has mainly been due to the various benefits that companies could gain, such as improved sales and profits as well as enhanced corporate and brand image (Anuar & Mohamad, 2011). CRM can help companies draw more consumers, escalate sales and enhance their favourable image with the public (Anghel et al, 2011).
CRM manages to bring a company and its consumers closer through their shared moral values and societal integrity (Soni & Soni, 2013). For example, Langen et al.'s (2013) study reported that 93% of consumers purchased a CRM product because they felt that doing something good was important. therefore, CRM can be a source of competitive advantage for companies that intend to differentiate themselves from others and attract more consumers. The present study evaluates whether CRM could be used by hypermarkets to improve their performance in terms of increased consumer visits.
2.2Theory of Planned Behaviour
One of the models that is widely used to predict the intention and behaviour of consumers is TPB (Ajzen, 1991). TPB indicates that attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control influence intention and, in turn, behaviour (Ajzen, 1985). Attitude towards a behaviour is defined as the extent to which an individual has a positive or negative perception of the behaviour. Subjective norm is defined as the perception of social pressure to perform or not perform the behaviour (Verbeke & Vackier, 2005). Perceived behavioural control is defined as the perception of how well an individual can control the factors that support or hinder the actions required to handle a particular situation (Han et al., 2010). Intention is defined as the likelihood of a person to behave in a particular way (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975). Most empirical applications of TPB have explained and predicted human behaviour in various areas to understand the relationships among attitude, SN, PBC and behavioural intention, such as studies related to food choice (e.g. Lorenz et al., 2015), tourism decisions (e.g. Hsu & Huang, 2012), online buying (e.g. Yusta et al., 2011) social entrepreneurial intention (e.g. Cavazos-Arroyo et al., 2017) and consumers' shoplifting prevention behaviour (e.g. Potdar et al., 2018). However, TPB has not been used in the context of consumers' participation intention regarding CRM.
TPB may enhance the prediction of consumers' participation intention regarding CRM and hypermarket visit intention. Ajzen (1991) stated that a person's attitude is established by behavioural beliefs, which suggests that some cognitive motivation or factors could affect attitude. In addition, research points to the fact that attitude gives the highest explained variance of intention (e.g. Lam & Hsu, 2006; Pookulangara et al., 2011). therefore, in this study, aside from applying the proposed determinants of TPB (i.e. attitude, SN and PBC), the antecedents of attitude towards the CRM campaign, such as AFM, CSRI, CCI and CCF, are also explored. These four variables were chosen for this study based on a brief pilot study...
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