The relationships between shopping trip type, purchases made on promotion, and unplanned purchases for a High/Low Hypermarket Retailer - Evidence from the Croatian market

This paper explores how shopping trip type influences consumer promotion search, purchases made on promotion and unplanned purchases. For retailers, the importance of model presented in this paper is in gaining knowledge about shoppers’ response to in-store promotion and predicting retail outcomes based on the consumers’ level of promotional purchasing. The model itself was tested with data collected from a consumer survey, carried out in the high/low Croatian hypermarket setting. Data was analyzed using descriptive statistics, including cross tabulation analysis and one-way analysis of variance. Research results show that the type of shopping trip undertaken by consumers (i.e. whether the trip is major or fill-in shopping trip) does explain differences in actual spending, unplanned spending, and purchases of promoted items. As compared with fill-in shoppers, major shoppers did purchase more items and spent more money on their shopping trip. There was significantly higher proportion of major shoppers who spent more than planned and made a purchase of promoted item as well. Contrary to expectation is the finding that consumer promotion search was rather low across all five analyzed promotional devices regardless of shopping trip type undertaken.