„True Prices“ Campaign: Customer Emotions and Loyalty in Food Retail
(A2025-125893)

AUTHORS

Doreén Pick, University of Applied Sciences Merseburg

ABSTRACT

Retailers rely on cause-related marketing (CRM) to achieve positive effects such as customer loyalty. However, only a few companies associate these CRM campaigns with potential disadvantages such as increased product prices, so-called “true price” campaigns. The effects of this practice are little known and are therefore the focus of our study. We use content analysis to evaluate 398 posts from readers of a daily newspaper about the “True Prices” campaign by the German discounter Penny. The results show that customers do not automatically support environmental and social price markups for food, but rather react with negative emotions and refusal to buy. The most common emotion is anger, followed by irony to deal with the perceived negative situation. Our study complements the increasing number of studies on CSR campaigns that document negative effects on customers. During the years of increasing acceptance of CSR measures, there seems to be a paradigm shift on the customer side.