Mapping the Research Pattern of Cause-related Marketing: A Bibliometric Analysis of Publications during 2000-2020

ABSTRACT

When it became clear that cause-related marketing (CaRM) is a primary driver of a company’s marketing strategy, CaRM as a research domain developed rapidly. Despite the fact that CaRM has received a lot of attention, only a few authors have done bibliometric analysis on it. As a result, an additional bibliometric analysis of CaRM is required to bring together the additional contributions, developments, and current research lines. Thus, this research aims to use bibliometric analysis to better understand the CaRM concept in marketing literature. In this study, 443 articles from Scopus, a widely used electronic database, are retrieved for the years 2000 to 2020. The authors used VOSviewer to perform citation analysis, co-citation analysis, keyword analysis, and bibliographic coupling. Our findings revealed that the field’s development is dominated by authors and institutes from the United States and Europe. The presence of Asian countries indicates that the topic of research is becoming increasingly important. The data support the claim that the majority of current ideas in the field are derived from publications published in prestigious journals. Bibliographic coupling resulted in the identification of five clusters: (1) mechanism of CaRM, (2) attributes of CaRM, (3) CaRM and consumer behavior, (4) role of different factors in the effectiveness of CaRM, (5) cause and brand in CaRM. The findings of this study will be relevant not only to scholars working in the CaRM field but also to practitioners and policymakers who want to improve their understanding of CaRM.

KEYWORDS:

• Cause-related marketing
• bibliometric analysis
• citation analysis
• Co-citation analysis
• Co-occurrence of author keywords bibliographic coupling
• cluster analysis
• VOSviewer

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).