Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

12-2017

Abstract

In-store product sampling is a commonly used promotional technique designed to give prospective consumers an opportunity to experience a product prior to purchase. While prior research has documented a positive relationship between short-term sales and perceptual measures of the customer shopping experience, little is known about the long-term impact of sampling or factors that moderate its success. In this paper, we develop an empirical approach that allows us to study the short-term and long-term effects of in-store sampling on both own and competitive products. We apply our approach to six store-level scanner data sets across four different product categories and show that in-store sampling has both an immediate (short-term) and sustained (long-term) impact on sales. We also show that the impact of sampling on sales is moderated by the characteristics of the store conducting the event, and that repeated sampling for a single product leads to a multiplicative increase in its long-term sales performance. We find that, unlike many types of in-store promotion, sampling results in a category expansion effect as opposed to a pure substitution effect. We contrast the immediate and long-term sales patterns for in-store sampling to those of product displays and discuss managerially relevant differences. Finally, we demonstrate incremental profit implications and store selection scenarios for different incremental costs of conducting the in-store events using constrained optimizations.

Keywords

Marketing mix modeling, In-store sampling, Retail strategy

Discipline

Marketing

Research Areas

Marketing

Publication

Journal of Retailing

Volume

93

Issue

4

First Page

493

Last Page

506

ISSN

0022-4359

Identifier

10.1016/j.jretai.2017.07.002

Publisher

Elsevier

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jretai.2017.07.002

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