Research On The Impact Mechanism Of Online And Offline Price Promotions On Retailers' Performanc

Price promotion is an important marketing strategy for retailers,and online and offline multi-channel retailing has become the main trend.Therefore,it is particularly important for retailers to balance and make online and offline price promotion decisions.For this reason,scholars have carried out a lot of research on the effect of multi-channel price promotion.However,most of the extant studies use empirical data to estimate the impact of retailers’ promotional activities in one channel on the performance of another channel,or use the model to simulate and analyze the competitive results of multichannel price promotion by different retailers.When it comes to the influence mechanism of multi-channel promotion on retailer performance,especially the impact mechanism of long-term performance,the relevant conclusions are relatively rare,so it provides a certain exploration space for this article.Specifically,most of the extant literatures only focus on the short-term impact of price promotion.For example,the relevant conclusions show that price promotion can attract store changers and effectively increase the number of customers in stores,thus significantly increasing the current sales of retailers.Therefore,in the short term,price promotion is indeed an effective means to promote sales growth.However,there is some controversy about the long-term impact of price promotion,that is,whether it will have a long-term impact on the performance of retailers,and the existing research conclusions are not unified.In the long run,on the one hand,price promotion induces consumers to buy more and spend faster,which has a positive impact on the long-term performance of retailers.But on the other hand,the influence of repeated promotion on consumer choice will gradually decline,and long-term and frequent price promotion will improve consumers’ price sensitivity and damage consumers’ brand loyalty,so the sales growth will be less and less.This will have a negative impact on the performance of retailers.In particular,price promotion will stimulate consumers to buy in advance and stock inventory,such a large number of purchases will make consumers no longer repeat purchases for a period of time,thus forming the phenomenon of sales decline immediately after the promotion period.Therefore,the long-term impact of price promotion on the performance of retailers is uncertain,which may be positive or negative.So,in the multi-channel price promotion,is the positive impact and negative impact also formed in this way? How is the cross-channel influence formed? There is no reasonable explanation mechanism for these problems in the extant research.If this mechanism can be clearly explained,it will help to optimize retailers’ multi-channel price promotion decisions,and then improve the positive impact of price promotion on retailers’ long-term performance and avoid its negative impact.At the same time,in practice,the price promotion of multi-channel retailers is increasingly characterized by social interaction,and has gradually become the mainstream,such as the need for customers to get discounts and discounts by doing tasks or forming teams.So,does this process of social interaction have an impact on the performance of retailers,especially in the long run? If so,what is the impact?Through what kind of mechanism does it work? These are the issues that retail operators are quite concerned about,and they are also the starting point of this paper.In order to find answers to the above questions,this paper summarizes the relevant research in this field,and finds three main research perspectives: economic perspective,psychological perspective and social interaction perspective.First of all,the traditional economic research perspective regards consumers as rational people who make decisions based on rational analysis.According to the perspective of rational people,customers make current decisions according to the results of profit maximization analysis in the current transaction,so it is difficult to explain the impact of current price promotion on future performance.Secondly,the psychological perspective of the study takes consumers as behavioral decision makers who accept price promotion incentives and then make shopping responses.From the perspective of psychology,the impact of current price promotion is the customer’s behavioral response to the current stimulus,which produces results in the current period,and it is difficult to explain how the current stimulus has an intertemporal impact on customers’ behavior in the future.Therefore,in the above two research perspectives,the transaction relationship between customers and retailers is easy to stop after the end of the current transaction,and it is difficult to form the intertemporal impact of price promotion.In order to analyze how the current retailer price promotion affects consumers’ shopping decisions in the future,a new research perspective is needed.Finally,the emerging perspective of social interaction takes the relationship as the research object,which allows the simple transaction relationship between customers and retailers to be magnified into the context of social interaction.This pursuit of long-term reciprocal relationship provides an effective theoretical basis for the long-term influence mechanism of price promotion.Therefore,this paper decides to explore the influence mechanism of online and offline price promotion on the performance of retailers from the perspective of social interaction.Based on the search of the extant social interaction literature,the author finds that the introduction of the concept of social closeness is helpful to solve this problem.Specifically,the social closeness between retailers and customers can be understood as the degree of interdependence between retailers and customers in cognitive,emotional and behavioral dimensions.Because of the economic transaction relationship and social interaction between retailers and customers,there is not only the economic closeness brought by the frequency and intensity of the transaction,but also the closeness of social interaction.This paper focuses on the formation of social closeness through the process of social interaction between retailers and customers.And in the context of price promotion,social closeness is also inextricably linked with the economic transaction relationship between the two sides.This provides a certain possibility for us to study the intertemporal impact of economic transaction relationship brought about by price promotion from the perspective of social closeness.Therefore,from the perspective of social interaction,this paper discusses the concept and dimension of social closeness between customers and retailers for the first time,and adds social closeness to the influence mechanism of price promotion.in order to reveal how social interaction plays a role in the influence of price promotion in different channels of retailers.In the process of research,in order to better introduce the perspective of social interaction into the study of the influence mechanism of price promotion,this paper designs qualitative research and quantitative research respectively.On the one hand,through interview analysis,this paper uses qualitative research to carry out a basic discussion on the theoretical model of the whole influence mechanism;on the other hand,on the basis of qualitative research,quantitative research is used to further verify the proposed influence mechanism model.Specifically,in the qualitative study,the author selected 26 college students to conduct in-depth interviews from the perspective of social interaction in view of their online and offline shopping experiences,especially in the process of online and offline price promotion.The purpose of the interview is to clarify the differences in the characteristics of social interaction between online and offline channels of price promotion,and to explore different ways in which price promotion in different channels has an impact on the cognitive,emotional and behavioral dimensions of social closeness.Based on the interview results and the corresponding text analysis,the author draws a conclusion: the retailer’s price promotion affects consumers’ purchase decisions,and the retailer’s performance is mainly carried out through different dimensions of social closeness.Combined with the existing theories of relationship closeness,this paper puts forward three dimensions of social closeness between customers and retailers: cognitive closeness,emotional closeness and behavioral closeness.Cognitive closeness(thinking close)refers to the degree of consumers including retailers to self-cognition;emotional closeness(feeling close)refers to consumers’ enthusiasm towards retailers and their relationship with retailers;behavioral closeness(acting close)refers to the interdependence and interaction between consumers and retailers in their behavior patterns,which leads to the degree of mutual influence between consumers and retailers.Then,based on the interview results and the extant literature,this paper develops a model of the impact of online and offline price promotion on retailer performance from the perspective of social interaction from the three dimensions of cognitive closeness,emotional closeness and behavioral closeness.The model includes eight hypotheses and is divided into three studies: the first is to explore whether online price promotion and offline price promotion have an impact on the three dimensions of social closeness,and how online and offline channels affect the performance of online and offline price promotions.Study 2 further considers how social closeness affects the current performance of online and offline price promotions.On the basis of study 1 and study 2,study 3 explains how online price promotion and offline price promotion affect the future performance of retailers.In order to further verify the rationality of the hypotheses in the above theoretical model,this paper continues to design a random grouping experiment from an empirical point of view,in order to test the eight hypotheses in the theoretical model through quantitative research.First of all,based on the literature discussion and in-depth interview data,this paper develops a measurement scale of social closeness in three dimensions,verifies its applicability in the retailer price promotion situation,and uses it as a measurement tool in the random grouping experiment.Then,according to the research objectives of study 1,study 2 and study 3 respectively,two-phase and fourgroup network random grouping experiments with an interval of one month are designed,and the subjects are selected among domestic college students to carry out data collection.Through the grouping and comparison of online price promotion and offline price promotion,this paper discusses the current and intertemporal influence mechanism of cognitive closeness,emotional closeness and behavioral closeness in retailer price promotion.the role of intra-channel and cross-channel influence mechanism.The conclusion shows that the three dimensions of social closeness will play a certain role in the influence mechanism of price promotion in different channels,and the specific mechanism is slightly different.The main results are as follows:(1)Cognitive closeness,emotional closeness and behavioral closeness can promote the current online and offline performance through information sharing and cross-buying.(2)Cognitive closeness,emotional closeness and behavioral closeness can have an impact on future online and offline performance through service satisfaction.However,the three can only affect the future online performance through corporate trust,but can not affect the future offline performance.And only emotional closeness can affect future online and offline performance through recommendation purchases,while cognitive closeness and behavioral closeness can not play a role through recommendation purchases.Specifically,the current impact mechanism of online and offline price promotion is to promote the increase of current sales through information sharing and crosspurchase behavior,while herd behavior does not play a significant role in the impact of current performance.In the intertemporal influence mechanism,cognitive closeness and behavioral closeness can have an impact on future performance through corporate trust and service satisfaction,in which corporate trust can only affect future online performance,while service satisfaction will have an impact on both online and offline performance.In addition,emotional closeness has an impact on future performance through corporate trust,service satisfaction and recommendation purchase,respectively.Similarly,corporate trust can only affect future online performance,while service satisfaction and recommendation purchase have an impact on both online and offline.Therefore,generally speaking,the cross-channel impact of price promotion is symmetrical online and offline in the current period,but the asymmetric influence mechanism on online and offline performance is found in the intertemporal crosschannel impact.This conclusion has a certain reference value for multi-channel retailers to make online and offline channel integration decisions.Finally,based on the conclusions of the above qualitative and quantitative research,this paper provides policy recommendations for the formulation of price promotion strategies for multi-channel retailers,summarizes the shortcomings of this study,and points out the possible direction for further research in the future.