驚喜折扣何時更有效?消費目標的調節效應

Abstract

Surprising sales promotion has become a popular strategy in modern marketing, and its core goal is to promote better marketing effect by stimulating consumers' positive emotional response. However, the potential of surprise promotion to arouse consumers' surprise is still not explored in current academic research, especially in the field of discount promotion. In order to fill this research gap, based on the theory of attention ability and information processing, this study deeply discusses the mechanism of unexpected discount in consumers' emotional and behavioral responses.

This study includes four systematic studies: First, in studies 1a and 1b, we verified through experiments whether unexpected discounts can effectively stimulate consumers' surprise feelings and further enhance their purchase intention. The results show that when consumers feel the surprise and surprise brought by the discount, their purchase intention is significantly improved. Next, study 2 further discusses the internal mechanism of unexpected discount affecting purchase intention. It is found that this promotion is mainly due to the fact that surprises have enhanced consumers' attention to discounts. Specifically, after feeling the surprise brought by unexpected discounts, consumers tend to pay more attention to the attractiveness of the discounts themselves, thus promoting their cognition and emotional evaluation of promotional activities to be more positive, and ultimately significantly improving their purchase intention. In study 3, we further explored the moderating effect of consumers' purchasing goals on the unexpected discount effect. The results show that when the consumer's consumption goal is biased towards pleasure, the surprise caused by unexpected discount has a more significant role in promoting his purchase intention. For consumers who aim at utilitarian consumption, this positive influence is weakened.

This study distinguishes the concepts of surprise and unexpected discount, highlights the core position of consumers' emotional experience in promotion design, clarifies the regulatory role of consumption goals, and provides inspiration for related literature and future research. In practice, the research suggests that enterprises can improve the promotion effect by incorporating "surprise". On the whole, the study reveals the emotional mechanism, cognitive process and behavioral consequences of surprise discount, which provides a new perspective and practical guidance for consumer behavior research and promotion strategies.

Date of Award	15 May 2025
Original language	Chinese (Traditional)
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Zhilin YANG (Supervisor)