The Effect Of Reward Type And Benefit Level On Consumer Reactance Against Conditional Promotion

In order to increase order size, promoting a product and enhance consumer loyalty, retailers often offer promotions with purchase conditions. Compared with other kinds of promotion, those conditional promotions are especially likely to arouse consumer's psychological reactance, because retailers often highlight purchase conditions that consumers must satisfy before be entitled to the promotional incentive in those promotions and consumers may consider those conditions as threats to their freedom.Based on the summary and review of previous research about psychological reactance and conditional promotion, we used experimental method to investigate influencing factors of consumer reactance against conditional promotion and the effect of consumer reactance. To be more specific, our research questions discussed different effects of price discount and premium on consumer reactance against conditional promotion in different promotion benefit levels and the effect of psychological reactance on consumer behavior.Our research result shows that compared with financial incentives, premium is a more salient external incentive. Therefore, premium would induce more intense promotion reactance of consumers against conditional promotions. Furthermore, we found that such difference only exists when promotional benefit levels is moderate, because the influence intent of conditional promotions will only be perceived by consumers when the consumer's elaboration likelihood is relatively high. Besides that, our result also suggests that consumer reactance against conditional promotion has significantly negative impact on consumer's search intention, and thus undermines the promotion effect.