In today’s technology-intensive landscape, retailers must rethink and effectively execute their marketing strategies across channels to stay competitive. Despite the several benefits of omnichannel retailing, whether to unify or differentiate promotional practices across online and offline channels remains a controversial topic among both researchers and practitioners, potentially impacting business performance. Building upon fairness theory, this multi-experiment research investigates consumer responses to these (un)differentiated promotional strategies. Study 1 provides preliminary evidence of consumers’ aversion to retailer’s channel-based promotional differentiation practices. Study 2 delves into consumers’ processes and reveals that perceptions of unfairness are predominantly driven by perceived convenience, perceived reactance and perceived other consumers’ ability to make use of the promotional deal. Study 3 addresses the conditions under which a differentiated promotional strategy can be effectively introduced without hurting perceptions of fairness and finds that short, time-limited promotional deals amplify the negative effect of differentiated promotional practices on fairness perceptions. 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.