Consumer Responses to Premium Framing: Better to Offer the Target Product as a Free Gift?

Premium promotion, which is widely adopted by retailers, involves offering a free product or service to consumers if they purchase certain products and services (D’Astous and Jacob 2002). Previous studies examining consumer response to premium promotions mainly focused on objective factors such as premium attractiveness (Buil, de Chernatony, and Montaner 2013) and premium fitness (D’Astous and Landreville 2003) rather than framing of the premium. Past research has found that subtle variations in price framing may influence consumers’ evaluation despite identical discount levels (Raghubir 2006). However, the presence of such an effect in premium framing (i.e., framing the target product vs. non-target product as a free gift) remains unknown. On the other hand, in this digital age, e-commerce websites and search engines can easily identify consumers’ target products by tracking their search history and it is possible for online stores to offer product packages with target products listed as free gifts. For instance, in Alibaba’s Tmall, a Chinese e-commerce giant, consumers searching for earphones can find earphones either as a standalone product or as a premium (e.g., as a free gift when buying a shampoo). The current research explored how the different premium framings influence consumer response and its underlying mechanism.