In today’s technology-intensive landscape, retailers must rethink and effectively execute their marketing strategies across online and offline channels. Despite the several potential benefits of omnichannel retailing, the decision to unify or differentiate promotional practices across online and offline channels remains a controversial topic among both researchers and practitioners, potentially impacting their business performance. Building upon fairness theory, this multi-experimental research investigates consumer fairness perceptions of such retailers’channel-based (un)differentiated promotional strategies. Study 1 provides preliminary evidence of consumers’ aversion to channel-based promotion differentiation. Study 2 examines the time-limited promotional constraints (i.e., high vs. low time pressure of a promotional deal) on consumer fairness perceptions and provides empirical evidence that short, time-limited promotional deals create a greater sense of urgency among consumers, negatively affecting their fairness perceptions. Study 3 further delves into consumer cognitive processes and reveals that fairness perceptions are predominantly driven by perceived convenience, perceived reactance and perceived other consumers’ ability to make use of a promotional deal. Such insights offer retailers clear strategic guidelines to tailor their promotional approaches and to, ultimately, enhance consumer fairness perceptions.
Duquesne et al. (Wed,) studied this question.