The Effectiveness Of Uncertain Promotion

Uncertain promotion is highly valued by retailers and is widely used in promotion activity on online shopping platform.Studying the effectiveness of uncertainty promotion is important to online merchants.Compared with offline stores,online merchants can present promotional rules more clearly and at lower cost.Besides,the content of online promotion can be more creative with instruction and pictures.Uncertain promotion has more unique advantages than conventional certain promotion: on the one hand,uncertainty may contain richer content and enrich the promotion.Also,it brings more fun for the customers and attracts more attention to the promotion.The merchants who hold the uncertain promotion will gain more word-of-mouth marketing and the brand will win more awareness;on the other hand,uncertain promotion will promote consumers to devote more time,effort and money,resulting in better purchasing rate and marketing performance.Firstly,this study has sorted the previous research,systematically reviewed the existing research results and theoretical basis.Secondly,a research model for the effectiveness of uncertain promotion and several assumptions have been proposed.Thirdly,empirical research methods of research experiments and data analysis have been used to test and verify the proposal and the research model.In the process above,this study has solved these three problems: how the marketing effect and communication effect achieved by promotion uncertainty;based on Positive Emotion Theory,Natural Optimism Theory and Expectation Overestimation Theory,what the internal mechanism of uncertain promotion effectiveness is;what differences in the effectiveness of uncertain promotion are while retailers promote different types of product.After analyzing the data collected in two experiments,the following conclusions were drawn:First,the uncertainty of online merchant promotion has a positive impact on the effectiveness of promotion.The higher the level of uncertainty in the promotion content and time improves the purchase possibility of consumers and brings more promotion attractiveness.Second,reward attractiveness and active emotion play the mediating role in the impact of promotion uncertainty on purchasing possibilities of consumer and promotion attractiveness.Content uncertainty and time uncertainty further enhance the purchasing possibilities and promotion attractiveness through the positive mediation of reward attractiveness and active emotion.Third,the product type works as a moderator.Compared to hedonic products,in the uncertain promotion of utility products,the reward attractiveness is more positively influenced by time and content uncertainty on purchase possibility and the promotion attractiveness.Meanwhile,compared to the uncertain promotion of utility products,in promotion of hedonic products,positive emotion has stronger positive mediating influence in the effectiveness of content and time uncertainty on purchasing possibilities and promotion attractiveness.The theory contribution and innovation of this research is to select online shopping platform as the research context.Based on Positive Emotion theory,Natural Optimism theory and Expectation Overestimation theory,the theoretical model of uncertain promotion effect research is established.From the two perspectives of marketing performance and communication effect,different levels of uncertain promotion and its influence on consumer purchasing possibilities and promotion attractiveness are the emphases of this research.The second study also explored the differences in the effectiveness of uncertain promotion under different commodity categories.The theoretical research on uncertain promotion is expanded.In the end,the author put forward suggestions for online merchants to improve the effectiveness of uncertain promotion,which will help them raise more scientific strategies and achieve better marketing performance and higher communication purposes.