Cause-related marketing is a pervasive, global marketing tactic, and the practice grew by 18.5 percent between 2011 to 2016 (IEG 2017). While considerable academic research has been directed to understanding this practice and its impact on consumers, one aspect has received little attention. Almost nothing is known about the impact on consumer perceptions when a firm withdraws from a partnership. Firms withdraw their support of a charity for many reasons (i.e., the charity no longer resonates with major stakeholders, the sponsorship fails to produce the projected results for the charity or the firm, or the firm faces financial constraints). We conducted three on-line experiments with samples of North American adult consumers to address this knowledge gap. We examined the impact of three types of withdrawal on consumer perceptions: withdrawal from a partnership, replacement of one non-profit partner with another partner, withdrawal from a partnership and a price decrease offered based on the savings resulting from terminating the sponsorship. Given that the extant research established that the alignment of the cause with the core business of the firm is an important factor in the success of CRM strategies, we manipulated this variable along with the various withdrawal scenarios. Our findings reveal that consumers view a divorce negatively despite actions taken by firms to offset consumers’ negative views.

• H. Aghakhani(Dalhousie University, Canada)
• S.W. Carvalho(Dalhousie University, Canada)
• P.H. Cunningham(Dalhousie University, Canada)