New Customers or Infrequent Customers Over Frequent Customers? The Relative Spillover Effects of Acquisition Promotions and Activation Promotions
研究发现，针对新客户或不常光顾客户的促销活动，会让被排除在外的常客产生更强的比较心理，降低其留存意愿；若通过线上渠道或延迟促销利益发放，可减轻这种负面效应。
ABSTRACT Recent research indicates that promotions targeted on new customers (acquisition promotions) and infrequent customers (activation promotions) can have negative spillover effects on untargeted customers. Despite frequent customers being excluded from these targeted promotions, no research has yet explored their relative reactions toward them. Given that frequent customers are highly sensitive to promotions and are crucial to companies, we conducted four online experiments to examine this issue. We find that being excluded from activation promotions (vs. acquisition promotions) leads to untargeted frequent customers' stronger tendency to compare themselves with targeted customers, resulting in lower retention intentions. This negative effect is mitigated when they discover this information online (vs. offline), or when the promotion's benefit timing is delayed (vs. immediate). Our findings offer a new direction for understanding the undesired spillover effect of targeted promotions and identify the relative impacts of different targeted promotions on frequent customers. We also provide valuable managerial insights on how to mitigate the negative spillover effects of targeted promotions by delivering delayed benefits to the right type of customers and through online channels.