Do you really want to use that coupon you’ve clipped?
By Nick Turner

Dr. Main (above) and Dr. Argo’s work was picked up by mainstream media, including the New York Times, CBC.ca, The Canadian Press, the Winnipeg Free Press, the Amherst Daily News and The Chatham Daily News.

When is the value of a retail coupon diminished? When stigma by association, or “courtesy stigma”, occurs. Here’s how it works: Person A uses a coupon at the checkout. Person C witnesses that use and extends their negative view of that behaviour (“What? You need to use a coupon to make that purchase?!”) to encompass Person B who becomes associated with Person A’s actions.

This intriguing consumer behaviour was jointly researched by an Asper School of Business graduate and an Asper School of Business professor, whose findings were published in December in the Journal of Consumer Research and extensively covered in mainstream media in the fall. The sub-title of their published article says it all: “Looking cheap because of others.”

Dr. Kelley Main, associate professor in marketing at the Asper School of Business, earned her PhD in marketing from the University of British Columbia, her MA in social psychology from the University of Manitoba and her BA (Hons) in psychology from the University of Winnipeg. Dr. Jennifer Argo, associate professor in the department of marketing, business economics and law at the University of Alberta School of Business, earned her PhD in marketing at the Asper School in 2003, where she also earned her BComm (Hons), majoring in international business, just four years earlier (1999).

“Jennifer and I wanted to investigate consumer behaviour that is not explicitly negative, but, when looked at more closely, in fact, does have a negative impact,” explains Dr. Main. “It’s fairly evident that consumer behaviour like over-shopping, -drinking and -eating would be negatively viewed by others. We wanted to investigate consumer behaviour that is not so obviously negative, and we landed on the perception of coupon use. At one level, it’s a smart thing to do, isn’t it: to use a coupon to reduce the cost of your purchase. But our question was: How is the coupon user, and how are others, perceived by those around them, and does the value of the coupon being used impact the degree of stigma by association?”

Field and laboratory research combined with a review of existing studies on the topic uncovered the stark truth: The coupon user is perceived as cheap, and so is the person associated with the coupon user. Further, the lower the value of the coupon being used, the greater the associated stigma is.

Maybe this is why value or member cards have become so popular in the retail industry, Dr. Main suggests. “Consider your Safeway Club Card; it’s really just a coupon in a different format, but you hand it over like a credit card. No clipping from the paper. Instead, the savings—big or small—are extended to every member of the club! And who doesn’t want to be a member of a savers’ club?”

Nick Turner, PhD, is an associate professor in the department of business administration at the Asper School of Business, and the associate dean responsible for research and graduate research programs. Nick’s own research focuses on occupational health psychology and transformational leadership.