Using Coupons in the New Era: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Attitudes and Behaviors toward Offline Coupons and Online Coupons

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, when marketers began to recognize high potential of the Internet as a new and powerful marketing medium, coupons have moved into cyberspace and become available in the electronic form on the Internet. Although online coupons (or Web coupons) still account for a relatively small portion of the entire coupon market, their value has been dramatically increasing with Internet users’ familiarity with the new medium and the prevalence of e-commerce in recent years. An online coupon as a research subject, however, has been rarely discussed by marketing scholars yet. As an initial step to explore many issues regarding online coupons, this study examined whether and how consumer responses to traditional offline coupons and online coupons are different in a cross-cultural perspective. This research also assessed the applicability of major propositions of the theory of reasoned action and the optimum stimulation level to explaining the process in which consumer intention to use online coupons is formed. Two surveys using college student samples have been conducted in South Korea and the U.S. While suggesting some significant similarities and dissimilarities in couponing attitude and behavior between the two countries, the results supported our hypothesized assumptions on the causal relationships among coupon experience, coupon attitude, and online coupon use intention. Along with practical implications for marketers who want to effectively utilize their online marketing resources, substantial issues of online coupons are discussed, as are directions for future research.