Legitimacy is a critical issue in venture philanthropy, social enterprise and earned income projects.
An older term for a related subject is cause-related marketing. In the nineties the Roper poll which is a distinguished survey company affiliated with Cornell University
found that products that publicly offered to donate a position of their products to a charity sold more than a business that did not.
Last year it was found in an article concerning the
bundling of products with promised contributions
to charity. Two lab experiments and one field study are conducted that compare
the effectiveness of promised donations to charity in promoting ‘‘practical necessities’’
( e.g., a box of laundry detergent) to their effectiveness in promoting ‘‘frivolous
luxuries’’ ( e.g., a hot fudge sundae) .
The results suggest that charity incentives
are more effective in promoting frivolous products than in promoting
practical products. This research extends prior work on the effects of bundling
complementary positive outcomes into the domain of affect-based complementarity
with product-charity bundles.