Sales Promotion

Pierre Chandon, Brian Wansink, & Gilles Laurent

A Benefit Congruency Framework of Sales Promotion Effectiveness
Are monetary savings the only explanation for consumer response to a sales promotion? If not, how do the different consumer benefits of a sales promotion influence its effectiveness? To address the first question, this research builds a framework of the multiple consumer benefits of a sales promotion. Through a series of measurement studies, the authors find that monetary and nonmonetary promotions provide consumers with different levels of three hedonic benefits (opportunities for value expression, entertainment, and exploration) and three utilitarian benefits (savings, higher product quality, and improved shopping convenience). To address the second question, the authors develop a benefit congruency framework, which argues that a sales promotion’s effectiveness is determined by the utilitarian or hedonic nature of the benefits it delivers and the congruence these benefits have with the promoted product. Among other results, two choice experiments show that, as predicted for high-equity brands, monetary promotions are more effective for utilitarian products than for hedonic products. The authors then discuss the implications of the multibenefit and the benefit congruency frameworks for understanding consumer responses to sales promotions, reexamining the value of everyday-low-price policies, and designing more effective sales promotions. arketers and academics often view the reliance on sales promotions, especially monetary promotions, as a suboptimal consequence of price competition caused by myopic management (Buzzell, Quelch, and Salmon 1990). These critics argue that, in the short run, the proliferation of monetary promotions erodes their capacity to rent market share, which explains why so many are unprofitable (Abraham and Lodish 1990; Kahn and McAlister 1997). In the long run, it is feared that sales promotions increase price sensitivity and

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