Green consciousness in India 45Cause-related marketing in India
In 2005, India’s largest consumer goods company, Procter & Gamble (P&G),
launched a cause marketing campaign called “Shiskha” (“education”) in
partnership with Child Relief and You (CRY) to bring education to underprivileged
children across India. This issue was identified as a top concern through customer
surveys, and the campaign was designed to trigger donations with each purchase of
a Proctor & Gamble product. Funds collected through this campaign are directed
to education NGOs such as Round Table India and Save the Children India. In the
last 9 years of the Shiksha program, P&G made a cumulative donation of more
than $4.5 million (Rs 270 million) to its NGO partners (CMF Global Voices 2013).
This campaign’s success can be directly attributed to Proctor & Gamble India’s
commitment to a long-running and visible marketing campaign promoted by its
media and public relations outfits. There are advertisements on different television
channels and publicity at points of sale at large retail stores and local retail outlets
to create customer awareness. The company has persuaded several eminent Indian
celebrities to endorse Shiksha and encourages its employees to participate through
hands-on volunteering. The campaign is active on social media; the P&G Shiksha
Facebook page has more than 290,000 followers (CMF Global Voices 2013).
Another successful example of cause-related marketing is the Desh ko Arpan
(DKAP) campaign that promotes a brand of salt marketed by the company Tata as the
purest-tasting salt and at the same time “provid[es] consumers with an opportunity
to contribute to a cause” (Shatrujeet 2002). Under this program, the company, in
partnership with CRY, has promised to contribute 10 paise ($ 0.002) from every
kilogram of Tata Salt sold toward the uplifting of underprivileged girl children. As
a result of this CRM campaign, Tata salt sales rose by 16 per cent, and “consumers
have begun to recognize the benefits of branded salt” (Hawkins 2015, p. 4). Like the
Proctor & Gamble campaign, the DKAP campaign idea stemmed from a consumer
insight linked to the idiomatic usage of the word salt across languages, from
someone being “worth his salt” or “having eaten his/her salt” or “betraying salt”.
The DKAP campaign draws heavily on the values of patriotism and philanthropy in
its advertising; the “purity” of its salt calls to mind Gandhi’s defiance of British rule
through his epic Salt March and becomes linked to a “purity of thought and action”.
The creative director of the campaign, Rajeev Raja (Shatrujeet 2002) commented
that they wanted to draw a parallel between the way in which small amounts of salt
could change the complexion of food to small acts of integrity and loyalty that could
change a nation, thus “highlighting small deeds of selflessness that reflect a respect
for the Greater Good. In the process, the campaign rises from being solely about
Indianness to being about good citizens” (Hawkins 2015, p. 5).
Campaigns such as these successful and visible ones are the reasons why
our respondents demonstrated a high level of trust (mean score of 3.57) in the
environmental claims made by organizations. The implications of this finding are
positive; corporations, government, and non-government entities have the social
capital to undertake pro-environmental initiatives and may generally depend
on consumer support for them (Table 3.4). In contrast, however, our survey