* Correspondingauthor.Tel.:#1-514-848-2942;fax: #1-514-848-4576. E-mail address: laroche@mercato.concordia.ca (M. Laroche). Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 8 (2001) 251}260 Consumers use of price promotions: a model and its potential moderators Michel Laroche*, Frank Pons, Nadia Zgolli, Chankon Kim Department of Marketing, Faculty of Commerce and Administration, Concordia University, 1455 de Maisonneuve West, Montreal, Que & bec, Canada H3G 1M8 Saint Mary'sUniversity, Halifax, NS, Canada Abstract In the context of consumers' use of price-oriented promotions, a multidimensional model, which follows a cognitive}a!ective- behaviorpatternwasproposed.Thismodelintegratesalltheaspectsofhowandwhyconsumersusesalespromotionsandspeci"es thelinkagebetweenconsumers' beliefs,attitudeandbehavior.Thecognitivecomponentofthepatternincludedtwodimensions:(a) theoverallevaluationofthebene"tstriggeredbytheuseofthepromotionand(b)theinformationsearchaboutthepotentialprice promotions.Itispositedtoin#uencethedegreeoflikingofspeci"cpricepromotionsaswellasthelikingofdealsingeneral.This a!ective component is then posited to in#uence behavioral intentions towards price promotions and stockpiling. A structural equationmodelinganalysis(SEM)o!ersrelativelystrongsupportfortheexpectedpaths.Moreover,thepotentialin#uencesonthis patternofconsumers' traitsareincluded.Busyness,varietyseeking,perceived "nancialwellness,marketmavenandbrandloyaltyare posited to have speci"cin#uences on the three components of the pattern. Results are presented and discussed.  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Price-oriented; Promotions; Sales promotion; Lifestyle; Structural equation modeling 1. Introduction Sales promotions have constituted an increasing pro- portionofthepromotionalbudgetsinrecentyears.Don- nelley's survey (Donnelley Marketing, 1994) found that packaged goods manufacturers' spending on consumer sales promotions now exceeds the amount spent on advertising and that "rms are using on average more thaneightdi!erenttypesofconsumersalespromotions. Several authors (Blattberg and Neslin, 1990; Schneider and Currim, 1991; Lichtenstein et al., 1995) identi"ed di!erent categories of consumer-oriented sales promo- tionsandpricepromotionswereoftenconsideredasthe mainfocusofthesestudies.Indeed,pricereductionisthe most cited bene"t of consumer sales promotions and asubstantialvariancecanbefoundacrosssalespromo- tions with respect to this bene"t (Blattberg and Neslin, 1990;Lichtensteinetal.,1995).Becauseofthecontinuous growing importance of sales promotions, considerable researchhasbeendirectedtostudytheirmechanismsin an attempt to identify and understand the deal-prone consumer. Nevertheless, "ndings pertaining to the sales promotions context have somewhat failed to clarify correlates of deal proneness. The main criticisms lie in the inability of previous studies to consider deals from the consumer's perspective (Shimp and Kavas, 1984), but also in the fact they use single-product categories for the assessment of deal proneness (Henderson, 1987) and "nally in their failure to treat deal proneness as a latent construct (Lichtenstein et al., 1990) that may be domain speci"c. Moreover, the lack of distinction made among the attitudinal and behavioral constructs when measuring the deal proneness concept is also a crucial issue in sales promotion studies (Lichtenstein et al., 1990). In fact, Lichtenstein et al. (1995, 1998) argue that the traditional behavioral-level measurement of coupon proneness was unable to fully describe the consumer's perspective on coupon's use and that a psychological- level of measurement would be more desirable in order to provide a better understanding of the coupon re- demption process. More speci"cally, investigations intocognitiveanda!ectivee!ectsofcouponshavebeen surprisinglyunderstudiedinthepast(ShimpandKavas, 0969-6989/01/$-see front matter  2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0969-6989(00)00031-X