Born to Shop? A Genetic Component of Deal Proneness

Price discounts, cents-off coupons, and other retail sales promotions have been found capable of eliciting strong consumer enthusiasm. Research on this sales promotion enthusiasm has shown that people have enduring differences in their likelihood of feeling it. The tendency to feel strong promotion enthusiasm has been termed deal proneness (Webster 1965). Given that deal proneness is both an interesting behavioral phenomenon as well as descriptive of an important market segment, it is worthwhile to gain a better understanding of the origin of this consumer disposition. An early view concerning the origin of deal proneness is that consumers learn it from the shopping environment. However, virtually all consumers are exposed to sales promotions, but only some of these consumers become deal prone. The possibility that a financial need for price discounts leads people to become deal prone conflicts with data indicating that deal-prone consumers tend to be higher income, not lower income, individuals (e.g., Bawa and Shoemaker 1987). Rather, the tendency for some consumers to become deal prone is likely to be based on differences among consumers as to how they experience retail sales promotions. For example, some consumers may enjoy deals more than others because of the ego satisfaction they receive from them (Schindler 1998). In addition to the possibility of acquiring deal proneness from the shopping environment, consumers could acquire it from their parents. Schindler, Lala, and Corcoran (2014) found that deal-prone consumers are likely to have deal-prone parents. Although they found evidence that factors related to the quality of family interactions affected the degree of deal-proneness similarity between consumers and their parents, the consumer-parent similarity raises the question of whether there is an inherited component to deal proneness. Supporting this are recent findings of inherited components to various types of consumer and financial decision-making (Cesarini et al. 2012; Cronqvist and Siegel 2014; Simonson and Sela 2011).