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PurposeOne purpose of this paper is to examine several factors that potentially influence a consumer's purchasing decision to participate in cause‐related marketing (CRM) program in the Chinese context. The other is to empirically test the hypothesized relationship between cause's attributes and purchase intention in such environment.Design/methodology/approachThis paper develops a measure for exploring the cause's attributes influencing consumer's purchasing intention. Two groups of valid samples, respectively, with 178 and 376 respondents are collected through questionnaire survey. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) are employed to extract and test the key influential attributes on the basis of data of two samples respectively, and structural equation model is used to define the structure of influencing attributes and to measure the degree of impact for each attribute on the consumer's purchasing intention.FindingsThe results show that the degree of cause's participation for consumer, fit between the brand and the cause, cause importance, congruence between the firm's product and the cause, cause proximity play an important role in consumers' attitudes toward the product and firm and their intentions to purchase the advertised product and participate in the CRM campaign, which suggests an opportunity for nonprofits to compete for these vital resources by nurturing and leveraging the antecedent factors and an opportunity for firms to select a cause partner.Research limitations/implicationsThe sample is a convenience sample that is the main limitations of this research. The EFA and CFA is difficult to generalize to a larger audience, and there was a lack of experimental control for the questionnaire investigation, so the quality of questionnaire can not be ensured.Practical implicationsThis research should help firms determine the best partners for strategic social alliances, and provide an advice on how to make them maximum participation, also should help current and potential consumers ascribe personality traits to nonprofit organizations and differentiate between nonprofits on the basis of the cause's attributes. At the same time, this paper provides several interesting areas for future research that will further aid marketing managers to develop a more effective CRM campaign to fit with goals of corporate, which adds some valuable insights or new ideas to develop essential theory.Originality/valueThis paper offers interesting insight into the development of CRM campaigns, and explores the five variables: the degree of cause's participation for consumer; fit between the brand and the cause; cause importance; congruence between the firm's product and the cause; cause proximity also should influence consumer's purchasing attitude, intention and decision behavior in the Chinese context.

Power distance was tested as a moderator of the relationship between justice concerns and employee outcomes in a sample of employees in the People's Republic of China. Two hypotheses were developed based on the quality of authority‐member relations prescribed by the relational model of authority in groups. In two‐way interactions, higher power distance combined with procedural justice to predict employee outcomes, whereas lower power distance combined with distributive justice.