The efficacy of sales promotions in UK supermarkets: a consumer view

Abstract

UK supermarkets need to be able to assess the current efficacy of the budget they allocate 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 160 respondents to analyse whether there was an association between the four consumer promotional approaches and respondents’ reported buying behaviour. The findings indicate that only price discount promotions proved to be statistically significant on consumer’s reported buying behaviour. Purchase acceleration and product trial are found to be the two 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.