Ethical Issues of Cause Related Marketing: With Special Reference to Melborn Milk Life Saving Programme

Abstract

Cause-related marketing has been described as a versatile marketing tool capable of accomplishing a wide range of marketing objectives. The fact that each year thousands of marketers use charitable donations to promote their products demonstrates that many companies consider cause-related marketing to be a valuable marketing tool. Yet, the benefits of such campaigns are not always obvious and many critics claim that CRM reduces traditional philanthropy. As far as Sri Lankan milk powder industry is concerned, CRM is one of the strategies, applied by the marketers. In this study, the attention has been paid to analyze the Ethical Issues of Melborn’s CRM strategy, because Melborn Milk was highly controversed recently as a product which contain DCD. Primary data were collected from Colombo and Matara districts by using a survey based questionnaire and 100 Housewives were selected randomly as the sample. Basically, it was attempted to analyze the Ethical Issues of Melborn’s Life saving program by using four variables. Based on the analyzed results, it was revealed that consumers believe the company’s CRM strategy as an unethical strategy. Further, customers expressed their negative views towards all the 15 issues related to the four variables and the mean values closer to 2 for all the statements proved this idea.