Developing successful cause-related marketing campaigns through social-networks the moderating role of users' age

This paper joins two streams of literature: caused-related marketing and viral advertising. Three main objectives guide our work: (i) to test whether a transfer of attitudes occurs in a viral cause-related marketing campaign (ii) to test the effectiveness of viral videos promoting a social cause (intention to share through social networks); (iii) to analyze the moderating role of users' age. An investigation was done with 431 netizens who expressed their opinions in a questionnaire after viewing an online cause-related video about dog adoption sponsored by a pet food brand. Our results show that previous attitudes towards viral adds will improve cause-brand alliance attitudes (H1) and brand attitudes (H3). Also, cause-brand alliance attitudes will improve brand attitudes (H2). The intention to share cause-related viral videos will increase when positive attitudes exist for the add (H5), the brand (H5) and the alliance (H6). Finally, age differences affect the strength of the relationships in 3 of the cases.