Consumers who perceive themselves as loyal customers to a particular company often believe that they have better than average odds to win contests and sweepstakes that are entirely random.
Lucky loyalty effect
鈥淲e find evidence for a 鈥榣ucky loyalty effect鈥� in which participants believe that greater effort (e.g. dollars spent at a retailer, nights spent at a hotel) results in greater likelihood of obtaining randomly promotional outcomes,鈥� say three researchers in the new paper 鈥淟ucky Loyalty: The Effect of Consumer Effort on Predictions of Randomly Determined Marketing Outcomes.鈥�
鈥淐onsider that scratch-and-save card you are handed while checking out at a favorite retailer,鈥� says Kelly Haws, associate professor of management at Vanderbilt鈥檚 Owen Graduate School of Management and one of the authors of the study. 鈥淸rquote]The more you鈥檝e shopped there in the past, the more likely you think you will be to get the highest possible discount.鈥漑/rquote]
Apparently, loyal customers make the leap on their own that they deserve such consideration, say Haws and her co-authors, Rebecca Reczek, associate professor of marketing at the Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University, and Christopher Summers, a marketing Ph.D. candidate at Fisher.
The study will be published in December by the Journal of Consumer Research. It suggests that promotional contests with winners selected at random will continue to be a good option for companies, since loyal customers will apparently continue to think they have a better than average chance to win, despite disclaimers that contest results are random.
I deserve to win
Loyal consumers’ feelings of deservedness were not easily explained, Haws says.
鈥淥ur empirical results suggest that a general belief in a just world or a generalized feeling of luck do not explain this effect, nor does the illusion of control,鈥� she says. 鈥淩ather, consumers simply feel that they can 鈥榚arn鈥� positive outcomes that are not actually earnable through their effort, loyalty or patronage.鈥�
An additional area for further study would be the aftermath of promotional contests, the authors suggest.
鈥淔uture research could 鈥� explore how consumers who thought they had higher chances of receiving a random outcome react when they do not, in fact, win the giveaway,鈥� the researchers say.