Strategic role of cause marketing in sustainable supply chain management for dual-channel systems

Cause marketing (CM) has become a prevalent form of generating support for a cause while netting valuable visibility for both the firm and the environmental nonprofit organisation. In this paper, to better help the government encourage CM campaigns, we adopt a stylised game-theoretical model to explore the strategic role of CM in sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) for an offline-online dual-channel system. We show that the offline retailer's incentives for CM can be weakened by online drop-shipping, and that the manufacturer prefers online drop-shipping rather than batch ordering if the degree of consumer mistrust for CM is sufficiently low. One other counter intuitive finding is that offline CM may be harmful to sustainability when the online channel is dominant. This result suggests that the government should carefully regulate CM in such supply chain systems.