The Effect of Consumer's Effort toward Effective Purchase on the Consumer Satisfaction.

Yun, Seungjae(Dept. of Business Administration, The Graduate School Yonsei University)

As the skilled new car salesperson will typically leave each customer with the feeling of having received a better deal than the most. The effect of sales promotion differs with the method of presenting to consumers.

The main objective of this study is to find out the structural relationship among the efforts of consumer toward good buy, smart shopper feeling and consumer satisfaction when sales promotions are offered to consumer. Through the covariance structure analysis this study tried to find out how the effort toward a better purchase lead to consumer satisfaction.

A structural model of consumers effort, Smart Shopper Feeling and consumer satisfaction was setup. Also, the feeling of responsibility on the benefit of sales promotion, the scarcity of sales promotion and the cost savings were included in the structural model.

To test the model, the 2x2x2 factorial designed field experiment was done, This study defines the perceived efforts of the consumer, the perceived scarcity of the promotion and the perceived cost savings as an independent variables. The consumer satisfaction, smart shopper feeling and the responsibility toward the benefit of the promotion was defined as dependent variables. Each subject of the study were given one of eight different notebook PC shopping scenarios. Each scenarios were designed(from pretesting) to elicit different level of the perceived efforts of the consumer, the perceived scarcity of the promotion and the perceived cost savings.

As a result of LISREL analysis, the following result was found. The perceived efforts of the consumer has a positive and direct effect on the responsibility toward the benefit of the promotion and the perceived cost savings. The perceived scarcity of the promotion has a positive direct effect on the smart shopper feeling and the consumer satisfaction. The perceived cost savings has a positive direct; effect on the consumer satisfaction. The responsibility toward the benefit of the promotion has a positive direct effect on the smart shopper feeling. The smart shopper feeling has a positive direct effect on the consumer satisfaction.

The result of this study suggest that when the sales promotions are provided it is necessary to provoke the smart shopper feeling to induce more consumer satisfaction. The consumer satisfaction will eventually leads to the ultimate goal of sales promotion, the repeat purchase.

To provoke the smart shopper feeling the marketer should consider the ways to make the consumers think the sales promotion is special in the planning process of sales promotion. Also, the sales promotions which need more effort of consumer could produce more smart shopper feeling.

Key words : Smart Shopper Feeling, Sales Promotion, LISREL,