Role of social responsibility campaigns in creating customer loyalty and an application

Developments in our modern world have profoundly affected the field of marketing, like any other profession, and paved the way to the emergence of new concepts and practices in marketing. It is not only the business world that has gone through a change; customers did also change, by differentiating their preferences and purchasing behavior.Technological developments and globalization abolished the national borders and consequently competition became fiercer in the business world. Nowadays, almost all companies execute classical competitive strategies such as improving product and service quality, adjusting prices and implementing customer retention programs. Consequently, today's companies more and more have to develop and relay on the new generation competitive strategies in order to differentiate themselves from the rest. Moreover, today's customers are better informed. In this context, "social responsibility campaigns" come into play as a new competitive strategy; via social responsibility campaigns, companies express concern on the societal benefits and take a part in the resolution of certain social problems. Today's customers tend to prefer the products and services of the companies engaged in social responsibility campaigns.Social responsibility campaigns help companies improve their image among the customers and thereby customers feel themselves more affiliated with those companies. Positive image created by the social responsibility campaigns could trigger product and service trial for those companies and could potentially turn into customer loyalty in time provided that customers are satisfied with the product and services they have tried. Loyalty means that customers will resort to the same product and service each and every time they are in need. Moreover, these loyal customers are likely to do peer-marketing by recommending the product and services to the people around themselves.In the first section of this study, I analyzed the social responsibility and social responsibility campaign concept in detail by reviewing the following topics: emergence of the social responsibility concept; its development, importance, benefits and drawbacks; affecting factors as well as the principles of the social responsibility campaigns; steps in campaign setup and implementation methods. As a result of this conceptual analysis, I identified the key success factors in social responsibility campaigns in Turkey and worldwide.In the second section, I provided detailed information on the concept of customer loyalty; its importance, key dimensions, elements and types; affecting factors; customer loyalty development process and strategies as well as the impact of social responsibility campaigns in creating customer loyalty.In the final section, I reported the findings of a survey based study which analyzes the effectiveness of social responsibility campaigns successfully run by an important bank in Turkey.