PAD전략과 가격할인전략의 통합효과

Abstract

From advertisements of various services and products, which include magazine, health club membership, cellular telephone service, etc., one knows that marketers try to minimize the perceived cost of a product through the temporal reframing of a large aggregate expense as a small ongoing expense. For instance, a local health club tells you that you can join for only $1.50 per day as opposed to $500 per year. The advertisement places emphasis on benefit of a small amount of payment per day against to burden of payment in a lump sum. This temporal reframing of price is called as the ‘Pennies-A-Day(PAD)’. Previous studies find support for its effectiveness in domains ranging from charitable donations to cellular telephone service to health clubs membership. The PAD strategy is interesting for the two reasons. First, the PAD violates a basic tenet of rational decision making which argues that consumers should be indifferent to various framings of the same physical cost. Under the assumption of the rational decision making,the mere reframing of a transaction from a large to a small cost should have no impact on preference without a corresponding change to the physical cash flows. Second, even if individuals may not always adhere to the rules of rationality, the PAD findings run counter to the rules of mental accounting. Note that the mental accounting argue that consumers should prefer to aggregate, as opposed to segregate. Existing research has shown that the PAD strategy helps to reduce perceived cost of a transaction However, the strategy has been investigated only under a normal price. Marketers frequently use a price discount strategy but few study has focused on the effectiveness of the PAD strategy when the PAD strategy is combined with the price discount strategy. This paper was designed to investigate differences in the effectiveness of the PAD strategy between under a normal price and under a discount price. The empirical results showed that the PAD strategy is effective under a normal price however its effect decreases when it is combined with the price discount strategy. This results imply that marketers should be more cautious to adopt the PAD strategy when they have to use the price discount strategy. Subjects for this study were 170 students at a university in Korea. The selected product categories are movie magazine (106,000 Won) and electronic dictionary (310,000 Won) for the low level of monetary magnitude, the products for the high level were the membership for gym (1,300,000 Won/year) and that for English academy (1,700,000 Won/year). Subjects were asked to evaluate the three options that were framed as a disaggregated expense condition,a moderately-aggregated expense condition, and a fully-aggregated expense condition [2 (the levels of monetary magnitude : within-subject design) × 3 (the levels of temporal aggregation :between-subject design) × 2 (normal price vs. discount price : within-subject design)].