Marketing for Social Good: Navigating Prosocial Complexity
(A2025-126266)

AUTHORS

Pascal Güntürkün, Vienna University of Economics and Business; Lukas Maier, WU Vienna; Christina Schamp, Vienna University of Business and Economics; Katherine White, UBC Sauder School of Business; Yufei Qui, Imperial College Business School, Imperial College London; Kim Penias, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology; Luca Held, Vienna University of Economics and Business

ABSTRACT

Individual giving to charity is essential to alleviate some of the biggest societal and ecological issues in the world, from providing humanitarian aid, ending hunger and poverty to fighting climate change (UN Sustainable Development Goals 2015). However, prosocial decision-making is often complex and driven by subjective preferences rather than overall social welfare considerations (Berman et al. 2018). For charity marketers, it is therefore crucial to understand how prosocial decisions are made to effectively address differences in individual preferences and create marketing messages (Chandy et al. 2021). In this special session, we present four projects that acknowledge these complexities in prosocial decision-making and aim to uncover relevant biases, contextual factors, and motivational drivers that affect individual giving behaviors and increase the uptake of prosocial behavior at large. The first article “How Political Ideology Shapes Prosocial Consumer Behavior Research” by Ethan Milne, Kirk Kristofferson, Miranda R. Goode, and Katherine White identifies a lack of political diversity in prosocial consumer behavior stimuli that poses challenges for the generalizability and reliability of prosocial consumer behavior research. They review contemporary prosocial consumer behavior research and find that the study stimuli therein exhibit a consistent liberal skew, driven by consumer researchers’ bias against ideologically incongruent cause areas. The second article “When Claiming Virtuous Victimhood Impacts Donation Intentions” by Yufei Qiu, Sven Mikolon, and Pascal Güntürkün investigates how consumers respond to virtue claims in individual fundraisers. They find that emphasizing a victim’s virtue increase giving behavior because it allows donors to view their contributions as instigating a positive chain of giving. However, this effect is not universal, but depends on the underlying political ideology of givers, such that Democrats tend to be more inclusive in supporting both in-and out-group members while Republicans primarily support in-group virtuous victims. The third article “Does a Growth Mindset Matters for Prosocial Behavior? Results from Two Meta-Analyses” by Kim Penias, Stav Siton, and Liat Levontin explores the relationship between a growth mindset (humans attributes can improve) vs. a fixed mindset (human attributes are fixed) and prosocial behavior. In two meta-analyses, one including studies where growth mindset was measures and one considering studies where growth mindset is manipulated, they find that––unlike in other domains in which a growth mindset is often beneficial––a growth mindset has only a relatively weak positive effect on prosocial behavior. The fourth article “Perceived Value vs. Actual Value: The Power of Nonmonetary Framing in Consumer Donations” by Luca Held, Christina Schamp, Lukas Maier, Peeter Verlegh, and Yuri Peers examines when and why using nonmonetary donation frames (e.g., donating a tree) is more (vs. less) successful than monetary ones (e.g., donating 50 cents). Analyzing a large-scale field dataset on charity promotions, they find nonmonetary framing boosts sales significantly. Additional behavioral experiments reveal that this effect emerges because consumers (1) derive more emotional value from nonmonetary donations and (2) overestimate their monetary value. Congruously, the focal effect is stronger for hedonic (vs. utilitarian) and high-priced (vs. low-priced) products.