I’M WATING FOR ‘IT’: ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF STOCKPILING POINTS

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Loyalty programs are one of the most widely used strategy to promote sales and manage consumer relationship. According to Stourm, Bradlow, and Fader (2015), loyalty programs are divided into two types: non-linear programs and linear programs. Of these two programs, linear loyalty programs are increasingly expanding thanks to the development of digital technology. However, it is doubtful whether the findings of previous researches investigating non-linear loyalty programs also hold true for linear loyalty programs.
Our study aims to investigate what induces consumers to stockpile or use their points in linear loyalty programs. This is particularly important because it seems that consumers really have no economic incentive to stockpile points in such programs. They are not rewarded for their “stockpiling” behavior- the amount of points accumulated for 1 dollar remains the same regardless of whether a consumer has already accumulated 100 points or 10000 points. The present research shows that in linear loyalty programs, consumers stockpile points just for the sake of “it”. That is, our studies show that the degree to which consumers perceive their effort to invest until they reach certain point level (goal) to be high or low influences consumers’ stockpiling decision. Specifically, when consumers expect that they have to invest greater effort, they are more likely to accumulate points compared to when they expect they don’t have to invest a lot of effort. In the main study, we show that this effect was mediated by consumers’ anticipation utility. Also, we found an interesting phenomenon that shows even when a certain point level is not obviously given consumers still set their own goals and calculate their effort needed to reach the goal.