چگونگی برخورد مصرف کنندگان با تخفیف های از دست رفته: افتراق معامله، جهت گیری اقدامات و اینرسی انفعالی

Attractive bonuses and large discounts are often successfully used to attract new customers and increase sales. However, from a marketing perspective these attractive opportunities might have a negative side effect, as they decrease subsequent sales to the consumers who missed them. In this review article we discuss how the inability to regulate the pain of missed opportunities might lead to this so-called inaction inertia effect. We argue that deficiencies in self-regulation may be explained on the basis of a combination of contextual and personality factors. We present literature on contextual factors that facilitate regulation (decoupling factors), and action orientation, an individual characteristic that enhances regulation. Finally, we discuss the practical implications of these results for the marketing and consumer behavior literature.

Businesses spend a great deal of time and money in promoting their products and services to consumers. The goal of these promotions is, of course, to motivate consumers to buy the companies’ products, or to sign up for their services. Successful ways to promote products to consumers are the offering of temporary price discounts and the provision of attractive bonuses. Evidently, these promotions increase sales because they both attract new customers and promote the willingness to buy more products in old and new customers. In this article we focus on a negative by-product of these generally effective marketing strategies. Research in economic psychology and behavioral economics has shown that these promotions might not just motivate consumers to act on them; they might also immobilize consumers who missed these promotions in the first place. Such immobilization may result in consumers missing out on subsequent attractive deals and thus hurt the consumer (Tykocinski and Pittman, 2001 and Tykocinski and Pittman, 2004). Because of this, these marketing strategies may backfire and harm businesses, because when consumers will purchase less after missing a deal or even switch to another product or service, this results in less profit for the firm (Zeelenberg & Van Putten, 2005). The phenomenon that people forego attractive opportunities only because they missed a more attractive opportunity in the past was first described by Tykocinski, Pittman, and Tuttle (1995). In these pioneering studies, they for example demonstrated that consumers did not enroll in the frequent flyer program when they could accumulate 5500 free miles, only because they missed the opportunity to accumulate 15,500 free miles had they enrolled earlier. They coined this effect the Inaction Inertia effect. The term Inaction refers to the missing out on the initial opportunity; the term Inertia refers to the finding that people stay inactive (i.e., are inert) after this missed opportunity. The literature on inaction inertia suggests that consumers can get stuck into inaction, and decline further attractive opportunities that they would otherwise have happily accepted. This does not imply that all people are equally likely to fall prey to the inaction inertia effect, neither does it mean that inaction inertia should be seen as a given. In this article we will provide an overview of studies that show how consumers’ inertia may be overcome by considering action opportunities in isolation, free from the history of earlier choices. In addition these studies reveal how an action-oriented mindset may reduce inaction inertia effects. In the following, we will review the economic psychology of inaction inertia, and discuss the self-regulatory processes and motivational orientations that promote and prevent inaction inertia.

Large discounts and attractive bonuses can attract many customers and increase sales. However, many consumers are bound to miss these attractive opportunities. When these consumers cannot stop thinking about these missed opportunities they are likely to show inaction inertia: they will be likely to decline subsequent similar opportunities as well. Understanding how consumers can regulate missing more attractive opportunities thus seems crucial to prevent inaction inertia and to prevent bonuses and other attractive promotions to backfire. The present overview provided illustrations how enabling the regulation of missing a prior opportunity can avoid inaction inertia. Once potential customers can see opportunities separately by decoupling missed opportunities from current decisions, inaction inertia might be prevented. We discussed two kinds of decoupling factors. First, we discussed contextual factors, situational and product features that enable this decoupling, such as creating a larger distance between the current opportunity and the missed opportunity by increasing the time span between them, or reducing comparability between the two opportunities. Second, we discussed the dispositional tendency to decouple negative events from current decision, action orientation. Both situational and dispositional factors can lead to successful decoupling. They both reduce inaction inertia after missing attractive deals. It therefore seems to be crucial to know if consumers are able to regulate negative consumption experiences such as missed opportunities in determining how they will respond to similar subsequent consumption experiences. Hardly any consumption decision is taken in a vacuum, so this ability to get over similar consumption experiences seems very powerful.