Prime Day (photo by shutterstock)
Amazon’s Prime Day returns on October 11 and 12, and Lehigh University researchers say you’ll likely end up spending even more money during this special event than you did on Black Friday this year.
Their research finds that consumers are more likely to spend big and buy more items when companies tie their sales to a special day, such as Pi Day (March 14) or Star Wars Day (May 4). The results show shoppers are more motivated to take advantage of the big savings and use coupons on themed shopping days than during holidays and more traditional shopping days like Labor Day or back-to-school sales.
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“We found that day-themed specials make consumers more likely to use discounts to make a purchase compared to more standard sales,” says Daniel Zane, assistant professor of marketing at Lehigh University, in a press release. “We also found that consumers’ positive response to day-themed specials is largely driven by marketers rewarding consumers for their creativity in providing a way to celebrate the special day.”
While many people probably associate big discounts with big shopping holidays, like Black Friday, the study’s author says more and more companies are coming up with their own “special days.” A great example is Pi Day, where people celebrate the mathematical constant and the never-ending number Pi on March 14th, with deals on things like pizza and other pie-related items.
Some companies also time their big discounts for fun “holidays” like National Ice Cream Day, National Dog Day, or their founder’s birthday. In their experiment, the researchers randomly showed a group of participants one of two versions of a sales promotion. One version contained special day-themed discounts while the other advertised more traditional sales. The results reveal that consumers were more likely to make a purchase from a company celebrating a “National Picnic Sale” compared to a business promoting a regular one-day sale.
In another test, the study authors teamed up with a company that sent a 25 percent discount in an email for the day a company adopted its mascot dog. The results revealed that shoppers were twice as likely to click on the link compared to other people who received a sales email without mention of the mascot.
The study also found that when consumers see a real “fit” between a company’s sale and promotion of the issue, buyers reward that creativity by buying more. However, if a promotion doesn’t seem to fit the occasion, they react very differently. The perceived incongruity “ultimately impairs purchase intentions enough to negate any positive effect of originality,” the researchers explain.
Zane adds that more traditional sales can also create negative feelings toward some businesses because buyers assume they’re just lowering prices to get people to spend money or so the company can unload old merchandise.
“Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this study was what we found to be the psychological driver of consumers’ positive response to day-themed specials,” says the researcher. “They actually think about how the marketer who created the special offer for the day was creative in providing a way to celebrate the special day. In fact, consumers reward the marketers for their creativity by being more likely to use a special day discount to make a purchase from that company.”
“The findings indicate that linking a discount to a special day created by the company can have a positive effect on real customer behavior,” Zane continues. “It is possible that consumers who receive special day-themed discounts may feel that they are unique or in an exclusive subset of consumers who receive the promotion”
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