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Top1. Introduction
Due to the rapid technological progress, the rise of Internet facilitates the opening of website and therefore electronic commerce has become more a new business channel, in addition to traditional way of marketing (To et al., 2007). The emerging online economy provides consumers with easy access to numerous choices. In recent decades, discount promotion has been a popular kind of marketing promotions for consumer products. Exploring effects of sales promotion is one enduring issue in marketing. Marketers use sales promotions to attract customers and motivate customers to buy products (Grewal et al., 1998; Chen and Wang, 2016; Mukherjee et al., 2017).
Prior studies showed that choices could be influenced by the framing of decision alternatives (Chen and Chang, 2016). Framing research has shown that different ways of promoting a specific behavior can influence behavioral intention (Chen & Wang, 2016). The content of price promotion, such as some of communication message is referred as message framing. Many studies have focused on different types of promotion discounts of consumption behaviors, for example price discounts, bonus packs, price presentation (dollars, cents-off, percentage-off and revised price), discount location (proximal, distal) (Chen et al., 1998; DelVecchio et al., 2009; DelVecchio et al., 2007; Hardesty and Bearden, 2003). This study is based on percentage discounts. A multiple discount is defined as two or more discounts offered that can be combined to create a bigger discount. This study uses a relatively form of price promotion on a single product verse multiple discounts. This study also tested whether the order in which the multiple discounts were presented influenced consumer evaluations. Moderating variables that could affect consumer perceptions of price promotions in this study is the product’s price level. The product’s price level may motivate different evaluation processes of the price discounts. An experiment of 3 (price promotion framing: single discount / multiple discounts- large discount first and small discount last / multiple discounts- small discount first and large discount last) ☓ 2 (price level of product: low / high) between subjects design was used.
Discount framing has been widely discussed (Gendall et al., 2006; Chung et al., 2011). Research on price promotions has found that consumers evaluate deals differently relying on how the promotion offer has been framed (Chen et al., 1998; Kim and Kramer, 2006). Research has investigated the effect of numerous pricing tactics including discount framing (Chen et al., 1998; Kim and Kramer, 2006) and discount location (DelVecchio et al., 2009). However, such research has mostly focused on single discount scenarios. The concept of multiple discounts refers to the situation when two or more discounts are combined together, and resulting in a discount larger than any of the individual discounts. Previous studies provide little attention about the relative effectiveness of such discounts. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to investigate the influence of price promotion framing messages (single discount and multiple discounts) on consumer willingness to buy.