Press Release

Dr. He Michael Jia, Assistant Professor of Marketing, Faculty of Business and Economics, has won the Research Output Prize (ROP) 2018-19, which is a Faculty-based award to honour the best research output from each Faculty.  This year, ten Research Output Prizes are conferred on the authors by the Faculties. 

The paper earned Dr. Jia this award was "Do Consumers Always Spend More When Coupon Face Value is Larger? The Inverted U-Shaped Effect of Coupon Face Value on Consumer Spending Level", which was published in the Journal of Marketing in 2018. While it is commonly expected that a larger coupon face value would incentivize consumers to spend more, this paper presented the conditions in which the relationship between coupon face value and consumer spending level did not take a positive form, rather, it was an inverted U-shape.

The research made an important first attempt to examine how coupon face value influences consumer spending level in the context of using a coupon for different products within the same product line of a brand. The findings provided advices for marketing practitioners with a contingency approach for effectively managing the face value of a product-line coupon to avoid the negative consequence. Marketers can determine when they should offer product-line coupons with either a large or a moderate face value based on the research findings, depending on whether the relationship between coupon face value and consumer spending is simply positive or inverted U-shaped.

Reference:

[1] Research Output Prize Winners 2018-19

[2] Jia, He, et al. "Do Consumers Always Spend More When Coupon Face Value is Larger? The Inverted U-Shaped Effect of Coupon Face Value on Consumer Spending Level." Journal of Marketing 82.4 (2018): 70-85.