Promotion and shoppers' impulse purchases: the example of clothes

Purpose – This paper draws attention to the fact that impulse buying is common behaviour among modern shoppers and that a consumer's impulse purchases of items such as clothes may be a result of the retailers' promotional activities. The purpose of this paper is therefore to investigate how promotion through channels such as direct-mail marketing, TV commercials and special in-store displays affects consumers' impulse purchases of clothes. Design/methodology/approach – Data for the testing of five hypotheses was collected by distributing a questionnaire to randomly selected households in North Western France and Northern Sweden. The data collection rendered 493 complete questionnaires, of which 332 were from France and 161 from Sweden. Seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) is the principal estimation technique. Findings – The results suggest that shoppers with a positive attitude towards direct-mail marketing and TV commercials also respond positively to in-store promotion. Hence, there are interactive effects between the three promotional channels that increase shoppers' general impulse purchase tendency. Furthermore, the findings demonstrate that the frequency of exposure to in-store promotion has a significant effect on this tendency. Originality/value – This paper contributes to extant knowledge on impulse buying behaviour by examining the product-specific impulse tendency, which is defined as the degree to which consumers make impulse purchases of a particular product category.