Uncertain Reward Campaigns Impact Consumers’ Size Choices

Many companies annually launch uncertain reward campaigns, where consumers are given a chance to win a prize with each purchase. Uncertain reward campaigns offer consumers a probability (e.g., one in four chances) to win a gradient of prizes, ranging from nominal to valuable. For example, Tim Hortons’ Roll-Up-The-Rim campaign gives explicit odds of a 1 in 6 chance to win, with the prizes ranging from a hot beverage to a new car (Roll-Up-the-Rim Website, 2017). Similar uncertain reward campaigns include Coca Cola’s Sip & Scan, Pepsico’s Win Every Hour, M&M’s When We Win, You Win, and Wendy’s Dip & Squeeze and Win. The gradients in the prizes exist to elicit interest, but there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that these campaigns may be changing consumer behavior. Specifically, a recent article in the Huffington Post suggests that consumers are purchasing larger products (or ‘supersizing’) during Tim Horton’s Roll-Up-The-Rim campaign (Yum, 2013). Although the company regularly advertises otherwise, it thus appears that customers behave as if larger beverage sizes bring better odds (Yum, 2013). This speculation has incited customers to catalogue the prize frequency and distribution across cup sizes (Roll Up the Stats Website, 2015). The results of over 14,000 crowdsourced reports reveal no statistical variation of wins by cup size (Aspler, 2016). Yet this supersizing tendency persists. In the current article, we propose the intriguing possibility that supersizing during uncertain reward campaigns is occurring because consumers infer that their odds of winning the most elusive prize are better in the larger sized offerings. Thus, we propose that it is not that consumers are rejecting or ignoring explicit information about their overall odds of winning, but rather they are engaging in tactics to elevate a sense of control over a desirable, but elusive outcome. Of course, from a rational standpoint (e.g., Expected-Utility Theory; Bernoulli, 1738; von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1945), if the goal is to maximize one’s chances of winning, consumers should purchase the smallest product offering and enter the lottery twice for an equivalent price. Yet if the goal is to gain a sense of control over seemingly insurmountable odds, then such a tactic may serve an adaptive function.