Research Article Promotional games: Trick or treat? ☆ Donnel A. Briley a , ⁎ , Shai Danziger b , En Li c a University of Sydney Business School, Abercrombie Building (H70), Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia b Coller School of Management, Tel-Aviv University, Ramat Aviv 69978, Israel c School of Business and Law, Central Queensland University, QLD 4701, Australia Received 21 March 2015; received in revised form 6 July 2017; accepted 15 July 2017 Available online xxxx Accepted by Amna Kirmani, Editor; Associate Editor, Ashwani Monga Abstract Some marketers use game settings to offer deals. Though research has studied the conditions under which consumers engage in such games (Jiang, Cho, & Adaval, 2009; Yan & Muthukrishnan, 2014), we know little about how they respond to deal offers won through the gaming process. We hypothesize that when faced with deal offers from games, such as scratch cards or trivia quizzes, consumers who are high (vs. low) in choice freedom needs often feel reactance and reject the offer. We find converging evidence for this prediction in both controlled experiments (studies 1 and 3) and in a field study (study 2), when using ethnic backgrounds as a proxy for participants' choice freedom needs (study 1), when directly measuring these needs (study 2) and when manipulating beliefs about the importance of free choice (study 3). © 2017 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Choice freedom; Promotional games; Reactance Marketers frequently use promotions in which consumers can win deals by playing a game. For example, McDonald's offers customers deals and gifts through scratch cards given away in restaurants around the world (Ramarques, 2013). Promotional campaigns based on game settings are used widely and account for over $1.8 billion in annual marketing expenditures (Smith, 2009). But are these expenditures actually improving deal conversion? It is important to raise this question because some promotion and appeal tactics popular with marketers have been shown to backfire. For example, brand purchase likelihood is hurt by promotions that offer consumers gifts they don't need (e.g., Pillsbury collector plate deal, Simonson, Carmon, & O'Curry, 1994). Explicit identity appeals can also hurt purchase likelihood, by dictating consumers' identity expression and inadvertently impeding personal agency (e.g., “If you call yourself a sports fan, you gotta have DirecTV!” Bhattacharjee, Berger, & Menon, 2014). Also, brand slogans that implicitly encourage certain behaviors can prompt consumers to do the opposite, because of an automatic resistance to the persuasive influence of these slogans (e.g., Walmart: “Save money. Live better.” Laran, Dalton, & Andrade, 2011). Research revealing tactics that backfire has often attributed these effects to consumers' need to reassert their own autonomy when they sense an influence attempt and feel reactance (Brehm, 1966; Kivetz, 2005). This pattern of reactions could occur when consumers encounter games in a marketing context, because they might feel these games are meant to cajole them into buying. Previous research examining con- sumers' responses to promotional games has not addressed this important area. These previous studies have focused on consumers' evaluations of and decisions to play games (Ailawadi, Gedenk, Langer, Ma, & Neslin, 2014; Jiang, Cho, & Adaval, 2009; Kamleitner, Mandel, & Dhami, 2011; Yan & ☆ This work was supported by a grant from the University of Sydney Business School (M3PILOTRS). ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: donnel.briley@sydney.edu.au (D.A. Briley), shaid@tau.ac.il (S. Danziger), e.li@cqu.edu.au (E. Li). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2017.07.002 1057-7408© 2017 Society for Consumer Psychology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Briley, D.A., et al., Promotional games: Trick or treat?, Journal of Consumer Psychology (2017), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jcps.2017.07.002 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect Journal of Consumer Psychology xx, x (2017) xxx – xxx JCPS-00587; No. of pages: 13; 4C: