Introduction

More and more firms integrate their social responsibility initiatives into their marketing strategy by initiating cause-related marketing (CM) programs, where a donation to a designated cause of partnering charity organization is made by the firm for every CM-labeled product or service purchased (e.g. Barone et al. 2007). CM combines a firm’s social responsibility and marketing strategy aiming at achieving both, economic and social goals. The fact that CM is one of the most rapidly growing marketing strategies (Chang 2008) reflects the current relevance and potential that marketing managers ascribe this strategy. CM and corporate social responsibility (CSR) topics receive sustained senior management attention and CM is subject to an on-going discussion in the popular press (e.g. Henderson and Arora 2010; Porter and Kramer 2006).