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The underlying thesis of this paper is that consumers will infer that the costs of production of a product that is offered free are low, and this will reduce the price they are willing to pay for the product when it is a stand‐alone offering.

Two laboratory experiments examine how consumers respond to products that have been offered as “free gifts with purchase” of another product.

Study 1 shows, that when an economically identical offer is framed as a joint bundle (Buy X and Y for $), compared with when it is framed as a “Buy one, get one free” offer, consumers are willing to pay less for the product offered “free.” Study 2 shows that, when a product is given away “free,” then consumers are willing to pay less for it as a stand‐alone product, especially when the original promotional offer does not include the price of the free gift.

Results imply that the design and communication of consumer promotions affect the price consumers are willing to pay for a product.

Managerial implications for the design and communication of consumer promotions are discussed.

The paper adds to the growing body of research that shows that a price promotion has more than just an economic effect; it also has an informational effect through which it affects consumer responses.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate cause-related marketing (CRM) promotions as a brand-oriented international market entry strategy that can leverage an unfamiliar brand in a new international market. One of the challenges CRM promotions face is skepticism toward the campaign and for that reason, many brands form alliances with well-known charities familiar to the consumer, hoping that the trust and goodwill generated by the charity will be transferred to the brand. The authors manipulate price and donation presentation formats to show an alternative means for overcoming skepticism.

The research is undertaken in two studies. Study 1 uses a sample collected on Amazon’s MTurk, whereas study 2 is undertaken in the real world with participants from Norway. Analysis of variance and partial least square are, respectively, used to test the hypotheses.

The first study shows that presenting the donation explicitly vis-à-vis the price makes a less familiar charity produce the same trustworthy effects as that a well-known one does. Moreover, the second study shows that it strengthens utility from the transaction and weakens skepticism of CRM promotions to impact brand evaluations.

The primary focus of the research was consumers’ familiarity with the charity but other variables could have a significant impact in judgments. For instance, the importance consumers attach to the cause that the charity supports, spatial distance of the brand and charity, brand familiarity. Manipulating these in future studies would not only contribute to the CRM literature but also to that of international marketing.

Firms in international markets can derive competitive advantages with the help of CRM campaigns. Moreover, alliances with familiar charities that are local can help combat nationalistic feelings prevalent in many markets. The separated presentation format can also help overcome some of the additional skepticism found in international markets.

The findings support the Better Business Bureau’s Standards for Charity Accountability that seek transparency in communicating CRM promotions. The explicit presentation of price and donation, in addition to providing this transparency, also gives consumers a clear understanding of the CRM promotions’ details, which will increase their self-efficacy in making more informed decisions.

This research contributes to strengthening knowledge on donation-price formats, offers brands entering international markets a singular way of gaining credibility and competitive advantage, and empirically confirms the proposed outcomes of a theoretical model for promotions.

This work addresses how consumer perceptions of quality may be influenced by the composition of competition. I develop a theoretical framework that explains how consumer evaluations of quality can be negatively impacted by a product's stylistic similarity to popular competitors. These issues are examined empirically using more than 75,000 online consumer evaluations, from the evaluation aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, of 123 feature films released in the United States during 2007. Results suggest that during a movie's opening week, movies that are stylistically similar to the top-performing box office movie are evaluated less favorably. Additional analyses indicate that this negative effect may persist in later periods due to social conformity pressures, and that there is reduced demand for those movies that are stylistically similar to the top box office performer. This article contributes to the broader literature in strategic management by depicting how stylistic features of competitors can affect consumer behaviour and perceptions of quality in markets. This work also suggests managerial implications for entry-timing decisions and positioning choices.

Consumers are assumed to engage in external information search only after exhausting their internal information sources. Guided by the accessibility/diagnosticity and ease-of-retrieval frameworks, and the elaboration likelihood model, the current study investigates this phenomenon.

To test the relationships between internal information accessibility/diagnosticity and the importance of external search, and the moderating role of involvement in these relationships, 308 responses were collected on Amazon MTurk. Then, structural equation modeling was employed to analyze the data.

The analyses showed that while accessibility and diagnosticity of internal information have an impact on external information search, involvement with the product class has a consequential moderating effect on these relationships. In particular, in the low-involvement group, only the diagnosticity of internal information had a negative effect on external information search. On the contrary, in the high-involvement group, only accessibility of internal information had a negative effect.

These findings highlight the possibility of drawing erroneous conclusions resulting from not incorporating involvement, in conjunction with information accessibility and diagnosticity, in the study of the consumer external information search behavior.

The findings also imply that if practitioners aim to prime consumers to engage in external information search, they need to take into account that the effects of internal information's accessibility and diagnosticity on consumers' external search behavior may be different depending on their levels of involvement.

This study's results showed that without considering the moderating effect of involvement, spurious conclusions may be made about the relationships between accessibility and diagnosticity of internal and external information importance. This finding may explain the discrepancy between the accessibility/diagnosticity and ease-of-retrieval frameworks, thus enriching the literature.