Research On Consumer Decision-making Mechanism Behind Deceptive Promotion

As a kind of fraudulent marketing tool, deceptive promotion is an illegal thingwhich is used to seek the maximization benefit by the enterprise, i.e. the enterpriseuses short-term incentives such as material interest to induce consumer buyingimpulsly. In the long run, it not only squeezes other enterprises’ goodwills andreduces the overall efficiency of sales promotion, but also leads to the seriousdamage to faith and truth on which the market economy relies to exist.This paper draws lessons from recent theories about decision-making undertime pressure and lately achivement of overconfidence in the field of consumerbehaviors, in order to consturct a proposed model of consumer’s decision-makingmechanism behind deceptive promotion. At the same time, this paper takes aprofound literature review on sales promotion etc., and then designs a questionnaireto gather the data by the way of investigating the target consumer. At last, this paperuses the structural equation model to testify the mechanism model which wasproposed, and finds such important conclusions as follows.Firstly, overconfidence is the original reason which leads to consumer usingdeceptive promtion. At the process of value assessment about promotion commodity,consumers often exaggerate gains and lack in the risk awareness which we termed itas overconfidence. With the material interest provided in the deceptive promotion,consumer would have a gain confirmation bias, and weaken the potential risk of loss,thus stimulates the comsumer’s enthusiasm of participation in the rushing purchase.Secondly, the flaws of the promotion decision-making mechanism are thefoundation that the deceptive promotion prevails. In the light of design principles,the limited duration and materiality incentive are the two cores of the promotionmechanism. Therefore, the unscrupulous businessmen can make use of thetransnormal material incentive and time constraints for well-design to induceconsumer to have the perception of opportrunity costs that if he(she) does not buythe promotion products will be regret, thus the comsumer generates path dependencewhen he or she accesses to the promotion information. Thirdly, the path dependence of accessing to information is the key promotor ofthe deceptive promotion. With the effects of time constrains in promotion andperception of opportunity cost, the comsumer will strengthen the perception of theimportance of the sales promotion items. Simutaneously influencing by theindividual time constrains, consumer will be more dependent on the brandexperience and the profits information search behaviors in gains and lossesassessment. However, consumer can use his judgment ability to correct the appraisalresult by intuition, and the time constrains of the individual and promotion will leadconsumer being more likely to adopt satisfy rule on non-symmetry informationresearch and experience extraction for weighting the gains and losses, and causingthe unrational purchase decision-making.