This study is designed to provide suggestions on effective message framing to promote purchasing intention of consumers. Specifically, the study examines whether a message putting an emphasis on scarcity of a product functions to stimulate consumer’...
This study is designed to provide suggestions on effective message framing to promote purchasing intention of consumers. Specifically, the study examines whether a message putting an emphasis on scarcity of a product functions to stimulate consumer’s purchasing intention; and in particular, whether ads with the same scarcity message have different effects of making consumers buy a product depending on gain versus loss message framing used together, focusing on department store DM coupon-book ads.
To this end, four types of advertising messages produced by mixing ‘existence / non-existence’ of scarcity massage and ‘gain versus loss' message framing were exposed to 311 consumers to measure their purchasing intention.
As a result, it was found that a scarcity message had an effect of raising consumer’s purchasing intention, which was likely to change by message framing method. Specifically speaking, first, existence of scarcity message appeared to promote purchasing intention, compared to when there was no scarcity message. Second, gain message framing was found to make a more contribution to the raised purchasing intention than loss message framing. Third, if a scarcity message was given, using gain message framing was found to be more effective in raising purchasing intention than any other ad of the three types, produced by mixing the remaining number of cases.
In addition, the study examined whether these findings would make a relative difference to purchasing intention depending on the degree (high / low) of involvement and found that there was no relative difference. The study also revealed that there was no relative difference by product type in regard to purchasing intention depending on involvement.
Therefore, this study, which researched into the effective message framing for department coupon-book ads, suggests that using scarcity of a product is effective and that rather than loss message framing strategy focusing too much on loss resulted from not buying, gain message framing strategy emphasizing gain obtained when buying a product would be more effective to raise consumer’s purchasing intention.