Research On Consumer Promotion Strategy Based On Benefit Congruency Framwork

Sales promotion has always been an "effective" way for the marketers to explore and defend their market share. With the ever increasing competition, there comes ever fierce promotion war between different companies. Even though consumers are fond of promotion, whether all these promotions reached the desired effect is always a big problem for those practitioners.A few companies have some wrong ideas of promotion. They casually made their promotion plans, spent a lot of money but come with very little effect. At the end it is just a waste of money and time. So what kind of factors can influence purchasing behavior in sales promotion? What kind of strategies is effective and can really promote the products? These are two important questions we want to answer in this article.In this study the author constructed a consumer purchase intention model in the situation of sales promotion. After the analysis of the concrete benefits offered by different promotion ways and integrated a benefits congruency framework into our model, the author specifically discussed the different effects on utilitarian and hedonic products as well as the different effects of monetary and non-monerary promotion means. Then empirically we tested our hypotheses and ended up with suggestions on promotion strategies and managerial advices based on the results of our study.Our results show that the perceived product value and promotion benefits are the direct antecedents of consumer purchase intention while perceived product quality and perceived product price are the indirect antecedents of consumer purchase intention. The latter two can directly influece perceived product value, and further influece consumer purchase intention. Promotion offer customers not only cost saving, but also a series of promotion benefits, such as convenience, entertainment, value expression. For utilitarian products, monetary promotion is more effective because it provides more utilitarian benefits; on the other hand non-monetary promotion is more effective because it provides more hedonic benefits.So, we can give some suggestions for the companies. Firstly, they should have a full understanding of the benefits characteristics of the promoted products as well as the benefit characteristics of the target customers. Only with the combination of the two can we design luring promotion strategies. When emphsising usage of promotion, companies should never ignor the building of product quality, which is the most important element for company development. The rightly use of promotion strategy not only can reach our marketing goals effectively, but also can lower companies' marketing cost and maximize their profits. At the same time, a good promotion strategy can leave customers a good impression on the brand and establish a long term relationship with the customers.