Retailer branding of consumer sales promotions. A major development in food marketing? Robert P. Hamlin ⇑ , Sophie Lindsay, Andrea Insch University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin 9010, New Zealand article info Article history: Received 24 March 2011 Received in revised form 23 September 2011 Accepted 15 October 2011 Available online 20 October 2011 Keywords: Food Retailer Brand Price Sales Consumer Promotion Low Involvement Heuristic abstract This article examines retailer branding of consumer price promotions. It discusses the mechanics of price promotions, consumers’ reactions to them and the benefits that accrue to those that use them. It describes how large food retailers can now deploy branded price promotion systems that are fundamen- tally different to ‘traditional’ price promotions in both their mechanics and their effects on consumer decision processes. The article describes a field experiment that compared the performance of a food retailer’s branded price promotion system with that of a generic (manufacturer) price promotion. The research involved three experiments that covered two food categories (sliced bread and margarine) and two levels of discount (10% and 20%). The results indicate that food retailers are able to attach pow- erful brands to their price promotion systems, and these brand heuristics can significantly increase con- sumer purchase intent relative to an equivalent generic/manufacturer promotion. This incremental heuristic effect was stable in both categories and for both levels of price discount studied. These results are consistent with the predictions of alternative, non-cognitive and heuristic based models of food con- sumer choice that have been published recently in ‘Appetite’. Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Introduction The experimental research described in this article was under- taken in Dunedin, New Zealand in late 2010. Its purpose was to establish if a retailer could use its control of the retail category environment to brand a price promotion system. If such a brand could be successfully deployed by a retailer, then the ownership of the intellectual property associated with it would allow them to establish a significant level of control over price promotion within the retail environment. As price promotion represents the industry’s largest single marketing budget, with over double the expenditure relative to advertising reported in a recent analysis (Ailawadi, Beauchamp, Donthu, Gauri, & Shankar, 2009), confirma- tion of the successful development of any such retailer brand would have profound commercial implications for the industry as a whole. Confirmation of this development would also have theoretical implications. The typology of four retailer brand types that is con- sistently presented within the research literature (Anselmsson & Johansson; 2009) would have to be augmented by at least one additional major retailer brand type related to price rather than to product. In addition, recent publications within ‘Appetite’ have suggested that non-cognitive and heuristic decision models can be described and used effectively as a basis for understanding the decisions of the food consumer (Hamlin, 2010; Schiebehenne, Miesler, & Todd, 2007). Demonstrating that temporary price reduc- tions (promotions) in the food industry can be branded by retailers, and that consumers’ responses to them can be heavily moderated by these brand cues in a manner that is not consistent with rea- soned decision processes would offer further empirical support to this school of thought. Retailer branded price promotions are not a hypothetical devel- opment. This article describes the impact of a system of this type that is already fully developed and deployed nationwide within a developed economy by a large food retailer, and that is supported by a continuing heavy investment. The only theoretical issue that this research addresses is whether this investment has successfully created brand like behaviours with regard to a price promotion system. Despite the substantial implications of retailer branded price promotions for the food industry worldwide, there appears to be no mention of them in either the food research literature or in any other relevant discipline. Wider literature searches using Google™ and Google Scholar™ on terms such as ‘branded promo- tion’, ‘sales promotion brand’, ‘consumer promotion brand’, price 0195-6663/$ - see front matter Ó 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2011.10.008 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: rob.hamlin@otago.ac.nz (R.P. Hamlin). Appetite 58 (2012) 256–264 Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Appetite journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/appet