••• shopper insights
A delivery delay’s OK if the company pays
Online shoppers are more willing to accept slower delivery if the retailers agree to donate to a charitable cause – but not if the products are utilitarian rather than more of an impulse purchase.
A series of studies with more than 2,000 participants found that consumers were more likely to opt for the slow delivery option if the company made a $1 donation to a charity rather than giving them a financial reward such as a discount on their purchase. This was true across demographic groups, regardless of gender, income level and so on.
But the donation incentive did not improve people’s willingness to accept a delayed delivery if the items were mundane or everyday. “For example, if someone needed batteries, the donation incentive did not outperform the discount incentive,” says Stefanie Robinson, associate professor of marketing in North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management and a co-author of “Not-so-speedy delivery: Should retailers use discounts or donations to incentivize consumers to choose delayed delivery?,” which was published in the Journal of Retailing.
“People’s willingness to accept the discount option – rather than the donation incentive – went up considerably if the retailer also explained why they wanted consumers to select a delayed delivery,” Robinson says. “For example, if a retailer said the delayed delivery option reduced the environmental effects, people were just as willing to accept the delay with the discount incentive as they were to accept the delay with the donation incentive.”
••• consumer psychology
Can a little ribbing make consumers like your brand?
In a paper published in the Journal of Consumer Research, professor Gavan Fitzsimons of Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, with Fuqua Ph.D. student Demi Oba and Holly S. Howe of HEC Montréal, found that the use of “playful provocation” increases brand connection, by making brands more human-like and relatable.
As outlined in “Brand teasing: How brands build strong relationships by making fun of their consumers,” the researchers recruited 1,500 participants to imagine they saw a Valentine’s Day special Pizza Hut advertisement. One group saw a “prosocial” ad and the other two groups saw either an “antisocial” or a purely funny ad.
The prosocial text (“Make your plans now for a cheap date that’s almost as cheesy as you are”) led to higher self-brand connection than both the antisocial (“Make you plans now for a cheesy date that’s almost as cheap as you are”) and the purely funny statements (“Make your plans now for a cheap and cheesy Valentine’s date”).
Brands can use data from their previous marketing campaigns to train AI and LLM tools and help them identify whether teasing has been effective in the past but you need to know your audience and their sensitivity. “You have to know who you're targeting, making sure they won’t walk away feeling bruised and hurt,” Oba says.