How does the store flyer design and content features influence consumer behavior?

Abstract

Store flyers have an extraordinary importance to marketing management and contribute to a retailer's performance (Ziliani and Ieva, 2015). They influence the intentions to visit a store, affect the purchase of advertised and unadvertised products (Burton et al., 1999), improve sales volume of store brand products (Gázquez-Abad and Martínez-López, 2016), and contribute to better selling margins and profits (Volle, 2001). Therefore, retailers and packaged-good manufacturers, who are willing to pay to have their brands featured, are increasingly using store flyers as the primary vehicle for advertising their assortments, promoting new products, and communicating price specials to consumers (Gázquez-Abad et al., 2014; Gijsbrechts et al., 2003). Using store flyers, retailers can directly communicate with consumers, and influence preferences and behaviors throughout the stages buying cycle, both at home and in store (Gázquez-Abad and Martínez-López, 2016; Mimouni Chaabane et al., 2010). We offer herein an improved understanding of how the features of the store flyer design and content features influence the consumer’s perceived variety of the retailer’s assortment, as a dimension of its global image. We evaluated the effect of different store flyer design scenarios on the intentions to visit the store and buy (especially a store brand product) and how the perceived store image and variety of the retailer’s assortment can moderate such buying decisions. We also evaluated how different store flyer designs and content features are used by consumers in their heuristic decision-making process to visit the store and buy, according to the principle of energy efficiency. Our findings are relevant to both researchers, manufacturers, and retailers. Besides improving the efficiency of store flyers, the new findings will allow the development of environmentally friendly store flyers. This study is the first to delve into the influence of the store flyer design on consumers’ behavior after actually glancing through the store flyer. Although there are previous studies on store flyers that used experiments, most of them were based on econometric models at the aggregate level. This is the first study to combine a between-subjects design with a conjoint analysis.