Research on mechanisms of power and action for cause-related marketing: perspectives of enterprise and non-profit organization

Cause-related marketing (CRM) is a strategic model that links a company, brand or product to a non-profit organization (NPO) for a mutually beneficial purpose. Under the dual driven of institutional rationality and economical rationality, CRM has been used by more and more enterprises and NPOs. On the basis of summarizing existing related literature, this paper explores the mechanisms of power and action for CRM from the perspectives of enterprise, NPO and social system, and the authors consider mechanism of power is the result of the combined effect by the enterprise's push, NPO's pull and social system's supervision, and its mechanism of action is under the social system's supervision, enterprise is linked to NPO to form a closed loop, which prompts the maximization for three parties' benefits.