First three decades of cause-related marketing: building a deeper understanding through bibliometric analysis

Purpose The recent development in the scholarship of cause-related marketing (CRM) highlights the growing popularity of this field of research. CRM is one of the forms of communicating corporate social responsibility (CSR). Although CSR is being extensively studied as a field of research, researchers have made limited efforts to review the development and progression of CRM research. Being an embryonic research field, a deeper understanding of the current state of CRM research and future research propositions is required. This study aims to fill this gap by providing a bibliometric review of the CRM research published in the Web of Science (WoS) database. Design/methodology/approach A bibliometric literature review has been conducted of the papers published in WoS database to map the field of research in CRM. Various techniques, namely, citation analysis, co-citation analysis, co-authorship analysis, co-occurrence analysis and bibliographic coupling have been incorporated, and analysis has been provided. Findings The findings highlight the important themes and research areas focused by CRM researchers. The study throws light on the important research avenues present in the field of CRM. Originality/value The findings offer both academic and practical implications. The present study is a novel study exploring the scholarship of CRM using the bibliometric analysis technique.