Segmenting the audience of a cause-related marketing viral campaign

Abstract

This paper analyses the attitudinal effect of a cause-related marketing campaign which becomes viral through social networks. This attitudinal response is observed in three Internet user segments with different affinity levels: i) strong (familiar with the sponsoring brand and the promoted cause); ii) intermediate (familiar with the brand or the cause); and iii) weak (without previous experiences of either the brand or the social cause). To develop our experiment, 360 Internet surfers agree to participate. Their attitudes were measured before and after the showing of a viral spot in which a pet food brand encourages pet adoption. Our results show that a viral campaign works perfectly for the strong-affinity segment and adequately for the week affinity segment. On the contrary, this viral campaign leaves the intermediate-affinity segment indifferent.