You decide, we donate: Strengthening consumer–brand relationships through digitally co-created social responsibility

• Letting consumers choose a donation recipient for each purchase strengthens brand relationships.
• Not restricting cause choices to a list bolsters effects; expanding the list does not.
• The effects are serially mediated by consumer empowerment and engagement.
• Cause-choice effects outweigh donation effects for brands with a neutral or positive image.
• Cause-choice effects disappear or even backfire for brands with a negative image.

Brands increasingly use digital platforms to co-create social responsibility initiatives with consumers. The present research explores the branding implications of an emerging form of such co-created social responsibility, cause-related marketing (CM) with choice, in which the consumer, not the brand, chooses the charitable cause to which the brand will donate in response to the consumer's purchase. Study 1 shows that CM with choice strengthens brand attachment, an effect that is (1) stronger with unrestricted (i.e., choose any cause) than restricted (i.e., select from a list) choice and (2) serially mediated by consumer empowerment and engagement. Study 2 replicates these effects and extends them to brand attitudes while showing that expanding the number of cause options to as many as 48 increases decision difficulty but does not alter brand attachment or attitudes—a case of scope neglect prevailing instead of choice overload. Study 3 reveals that positive CM-with-choice effects are not universal. While introducing a conventional CM campaign improves brand outcomes (attachment, attitudes, and purchase intentions) regardless of brand image (negative, neutral, or positive), adding consumer cause choice to the campaign benefits brands as much as (or more than) introducing the campaign itself does, but only when brand image is neutral or positive. When brand image is negative, adding consumer cause choice fails to improve brand outcomes and can even backfire, as consumers prefer to keep their distance.