Changing consumers’ minds at the point of sale: price discounts vs. in-store advertising

Point-of-sale (POS) promotions are increasingly relevant for manufacturers, with substantial impacts on shoppers’ decision-making in competitive environments. To provide new guidelines for effectively using such promotions, this article distinguishes POS activities that provide an incentive to buy by altering perceptions of economic purchase value (e.g., price discount) from those that create a reason to buy by emphasizing product attributes (e.g., in-store advertising). Prior literature intensively analyzes the effectiveness of different POS promotion instruments, but no studies identify conditions in which manufacturers should choose either incentive or reason to buy instruments. Thus, this article aims to identify conditions in which each of the two promotions type is superior with regard to consumers’ choice behavior at the POS. With two incentive-aligned experiments, this article shows that incentive to buy activities is more effective for changing consumers’ minds at the POS when the brand relevance in the category and perceived decision difficulty are low. In contrast, reason to buy activities are more effective when brand relevance and decision difficulty are high.