International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management Essay

Introduction Sales publicity is the offer of an inducement to induce a desired sales result (Gilbert, 1999). For our purposes promotional techniques, deep down UK supermarkets, have been taken to be survey increasing promotions (i. e. coupons and bell deals) and value adding (i. e. premiums, prizes/contests/sweepstakes, samples, point of purchase display, demonstration and loyalty cards). Sales promotion consists of a wide variety of short-term tactical promotional tools aimed at generating a desired solvent from customers.Although there is a shift in selling communications, away from advertising towards sales promotions, there is no consensus among researchers that sales promotions idle words to repeat purchase. It is agreed, however, that wrong promotions can result in a short-term increase in sales (Smith and Sinha, 2000 Banks and Moorthy, 1999 Kopalle and Mela, 1999 Diamond, 1992 Gupta and Cooper, 1992 Bawa and Shoemaker, 1987). It is also important to note that studies o f price promotions also show that customers who take advantage of a price promotion often return to their favourite brands (Ehrenberg et al. 1994 Brandweek, 1994). There is a large physical structure of literature, which has examined consumer response to sales promotions, especially coupons (Krishna and Zhang, 1999 Huff and Alden, 1998 Leone and Srinivasan, 1996 Bawa and Shoemaker, 1987, 1989 Gupta, 1988, 1993 Blattberg and Neslin, 1990). Coupons and drops atomic number 18 the most astray used promotional tools. However, relatively little research has focussed on value adding promotions. In coupon promotions retailers maintain the original price of the yield and it is only coupon holders who be entitled to a discount.As buyers are not subject to a reduction in sales price there is no regard for them to adjust their internal reference prices downwards, as is the case with discount promotions. Therefore, coupon promotions should be more attractive than discount promotions in im proving the transaction value of the product. However, consumers must keep pencil lead of the coupons and produce them at the place of purchase. If consumers are used to utilising coupons then they are likely to have a more positive attitude towards them (Huff and Alden, 1998). Also, if a The authors D. C.Gilbert is Professor of Marketing and N. Jackaria is a Researcher, both at Surrey European Management School, University of Surrey, Guildford, UK. Keywords Sales promotion, Retail trade, Food industry, Marketing Abstract UK supermarkets need to be able to assess the current efficacy of the budget they apportion to promotional activities aimed at boosting sales. Therefore, the main objective of this article is to investigate consumer response to the four different promotional deals most commonly used in UK supermarkets coupons, price discounts, samples and buy-one-get-one-free.Multi discriminant analysis was used on a study of clx respondents to analyse whether there was an associ ation between the four consumer promotional approaches and respondents account buying behaviour. The findings indicate that only price discount promotions proved to be statistically significant on consumers reported buying behaviour. corrupt acceleration and product trial are found to be the devil most influential variables related to a discount. For buy-one-get-one-free, while the result is not significant, the two variables, brand switching and purchase acceleration are statistically significant.