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Fashion retailers and their CRM campaigns
Chapter four introduces facts of the observed companies and their respective CRM cam-paigns within the fashion retail market in Sweden. This chapter clarifies the contributions generated by the campaigns and the effects on the society. In addition, general information on the companies is provided with insights on their social initiatives and collaborations with non-profit organizations. This chapter is a part of the result from the observation. A complete report can be found in Appendix 2.
H&M – Fashion against Aids campaign
H&M is a fashion retailer which was founded in 1947 targeting only women and was called Hennes. In 1968, the company Mauritz was acquired by Hennes and was renamed to Hen-nes&Mauritz. The newly established company supplied clothing to men, women and chil-dren. H&M‟s concept is to sell fashion and quality for the best affordable price with its head-quarters based in Stockholm. The turnover for H&M reached MSEK 118, 697 in 2009, in-cluding 1738 stores all over the world. This multinational fashion chain has many initiatives within its corporate social responsibility activities for the environment and the society with sustainability as a fundamental core. H&M is currently collaborating with the non-profit or-ganisations Water Aid, Hand in Hand, Global Compact, UNICEF, Designers against AIDS (H&M.com).
Since the beginning of H&M‟s collaboration with UNICEF, more than USD500 000 has been generated through different causes and donations (hm.com). The recent cause endorsed by HM was initiated in the year of 2010 which had the purpose of aiding the victims of the earthquake in Haiti. This donation activity raised a total amount of USD290,000. Another ongoing collaboration H&M has is with the non-profit organisation Designers Against AIDS (hm.com). Designers Against AIDS was founded in Belgium with the purpose of increasing awareness of AIDS among young people by cooperating with the idols of the younger gen-eration. The organisation operates in many locations around the world but mostly focuses on the developed countries. Events and projects are constantly held by designing products to fulfil its purpose. This particular collaboration is a type of cause-related marketing offering a special collection designed by celebrities within the music, sport and fashion industry and sold in 27 countries. The collection targets both young men and women and includes T-shirts, tank tops, hooded sweaters. The donation agreement is 25% of the sales price which goes to Designers Against AIDS, whilst the celebrities design for free. The amount of donation has reached over USD4.3 million since the start of the partnership between H&M and Designers Against Aids in 2008 (designersagainstaids.com).
Lindex – Rosa Bandet campaign
Lindex is a Finnish owned fashion chain acting within the Scandinavian, Baltic, Russian, European and Middle-East market. There are approximately 400 stores located in these areas. The fashion chain has been active since 1954 and has a turnover of SEK5 billion (lin-dex.com). The target group is fashion-conscious women and children. The company offers a combination of fashion clothes and basic clothes. Corporate social responsibility (CSR) is a core value at Lindex where the company takes a range of actions to fulfil social needs.
Cause-related marketing has been a part of Lindex„s CSR activities since 2003. Lindex has been a head sponsor for the non-profit organisation Rosa Bandet since its establishment in Sweden in 2003 with the purpose of fighting breast cancer. With that majority of the custom-ers and the employees at Lindex being women, the company is eager to support an organisa-tion as Rosa Bandet. The final collected amount hit the high numbers of SEK260 million, which proved a huge success of the many partnerships. However, Rosa Bandet has used 16% of the collected liquidities as costs for the collection (rosabandet.se).
In October 2009, Lindex launched an exclusive Pink Collection designed by the Swedish supermodel Emma Wiklund. For every item sold, 10% of the sales price was donated to Rosa Bandet. The collection had 14 items such as dresses, blouses and accessories and they were sold in all Lindex stores (Bolagsfakta).
Indiska – Peace Trust campaign
Indiska is a fashion store with a vision to give colour and joy to Europe. It is a fashion chain owned by the Swedish family Thambert, founded by Mathilda Hamilton in 1901. The fashion in Indiska is modern bohemian and the 87 stores can be found in Sweden, Norway and Finland. Since 1996, Indiska has been supporting Peace Trust, which is a non-profit organisa-tion based in India. The support appears in different features, where two of the projects are within cause-related marketing. Peace Trust was founded due to the lack of monsoon rain, in the area of Dindigul. With the consequences of high inactivity within the agriculture industry, workers had to start working in manufacturing. There have been several projects e.g. school and education for children and increasing women employment by creating job opportunities.
A Women‟s Group started with the aim of initiating work opportunities for women with the motto: “Work gives independence”. The women produces postcards and other accessories of which Indiska purchases to sell in stores. For each sold product, 3 SEK goes to the Women‟s Group. Another recent campaign was conducted by Indiska and Peace Trust which contained a collection of specific dresses, skirts and tops. For each of those items sold, SEK10 goes to Peace Trust (Indiska.se). The duration of the campaign was between week 49 in 2009 to week 9 in 2010.
Mango – Oxfam campaign
The Spanish fashion chain Mango can be traced around the world in 91 countries. It was founded in 1984 and has grown to become the second largest Spanish retailer today with a turnover of EUR1.333 billion (Mango.com). Mango has 1220 stores with its fashion clothing targeting young urban women.
In response to social concerns, Mango has been financially supporting several of organisa-tions with aim of helping developing countries such as United Service and Missionary of the Capuchins of Catalonia and the Balearics, Fundacion Natura and Active Africa (Mango sus-tainability report). Different cause-related marketing campaigns have been performed by Mango, with one of them being the Fundacion Happy Hearts campaign. The major fashion magazine Elle designed T-shirts for sale. The profits of this campaign went to “Bantul Kin-dergarten Project”. Fundacion Vicente Ferrer was another CRM campaign that Mango en-dorsed with the purpose of building homes for women within a certain location in India. The CRM products were key rings sold in Mango stores (Mango sustainability report).
During the period of 2009-2010, Mango has had the actress Scarlett Johansson modelling for its advertising campaigns worldwide. Johansson has recently designed a bag for Mango where all profit generated from the sales of this particular item goes to Oxfam’s Haiti Earth-quake Response Fund. This campaign is also considered as a type of cause-related marketing. Oxfam’s Haiti Earthquake Response Fund is a non-profit organisation which provides differ-ent kinds of help relief such as water and shelter to the victims of the earth quake in Haiti. The organisation is co-founded by 14 similar organisations with the aim of fighting poverty.
Results
Chapter five presents the results of the tests for each of the hypotheses by using different sta-tistical instruments. Coding from the different survey questions will be used in this section and a coding book can be found in Appendix 4.
Hypothesis one
H1a High customer awareness indicates effective marketing communica-tions, which has a positive effect on purchase intentions of CRM product than low customer awareness.
H1b: A higher sense of meaning created for the customers derived from the CRM campaigns, leads to a more positive effect on purchase intentions than to lower sense of meaning created.
This hypothesis is reinforced by the results presented in Table 5.1, MC1 presents how many percentage of customers generally know about collaboration between Swedish fashion retail-ers and NPOs. In the next row, MC2 presents the overall percentage of customers who have been aware of the campaign. The majority of the customers have answered that they are nei-ther aware of the companies collaboration with non-profit organisations (60%) and of the CRM campaigns (55.4%).
Customer awareness of the collaboration and the CRM campaign
the mean scores of customer awareness toward the companies’ overall marketing communication and their respective cause-related marketing campaigns. The scale of MC1 and MC2 from the survey questions consisted of 1 representing yes and 2 represent-ing no. MC3 measured the value created for the customer when having a CRM campaign. The scale for MC3 is based on 1 which is strongly disagree and 6 which is strongly agree. The purchase intention on the CRM products PI1, was measured with a 6-point scale with 1 representing no, definitely not and 6 representing yes, definitely. The mean scores of each variable presents whether there exists a relation between marketing communication and pur-chase intention. The different options for the survey question MC2 in post-test were not taken into account. Instead, the question was viewed as a yes and no question since the different marketing communication channels are not of practical importance when conducting mean scores.
The mean scores presented in Table 5.2 can be reviewed as those companies a low mean scores of MC1, there is high awareness among the customers of the collaborations between companies and non-profit organisations. The same is applied on MC2 where lower results indicate high awareness among customers of the specific CRM campaign. The higher the value of PI1, the more positive is the customers’ wish to purchase a CRM product. In Table 5.2, there is a clear pattern of similar directions for customer awareness and purchase inten-tions; the higher the awareness of the collaboration between company and non-profit organi-sation, the higher purchase intention of the CRM product will be. The same pattern is de-tected between MC2 and PI1. According to MC3’s mean scores, the respondents agreed on (M= 4.81) that they gain value by purchasing a CRM product. However, the groups presents slightly different results, were H&M has the highest score, followed by Mango. Lindex has the third highest score and Indiska the lowest.
In order to see the strength of the relationship between the variables, a Spearman’s Rank Or-der Correlations analysis was conducted.
Mean scores of the customer awareness and purchase intentions
Table of Content
Abstract
Acknowledgement
1 Introduction
1.1 Background
1.2 Customer response to Cause-Related Marketing
1.3 Purpose
2 Theoretical framework and hypotheses development4
2.1 Fundamental theories
2.2 Main theories
2.3 Summary of hypotheses1
3 Method
3.1 Collection of Primary data
3.2 Collection of secondary data
4 Fashion retailers and their CRM campaigns
4.1 H&M – Fashion against Aids campaign
4.2 Lindex – Rosa Bandet campaign
4.3 Indiska – Peace Trust campaign
4.4 Mango – Oxfam campaign
5 Results
5.1 Hypothesis one
5.2 Hypothesis two
5.3 Hypothesis three..
5.4 Hypothesis four
6 Analysis of results
6.1 Customer awareness and marketing communication
6.2 Customer attitudes
6.3 Relationship between fit and customer attitude
6.4 Price
6.5 Size and type of donation
6.6 The proactive, the reactive and the non-buyers
6.7 Summery of hypotheses results
7 Conclusion and Discussion
7.1 Conclusion
7.2 Discussion
7.3 Future research
9 References
10 Appendices
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C a u s e – Related Marketing How Swedish fashion retailers increase purchase intentions by doing good
