Are Online Deal Prone And Offline Deal Prone Consumers The Same Consumers?

This paper identifies deal prone segments that exist in a multichannel shopping environment. We define deal proneness in this marketplace as the tendency to procure and use promotions in particular channels. We use latent class cluster analysis to a database of 1050 respondents. We use the motivations, opportunities, abilities framework (MOA) to predict cluster membership. We find for three different categories that consumers sort themselves primarily into procure-offline/use-offline or procure-online/use-online segments. Multichannel segments or combinations of online/offline are less common. Motivations play a small role in discriminating among segments – opportunities and abilities play a significantly larger role. This suggests that firms need to promote both online and offline if they wish to reach all deal prone consumers, or if they want to reach for example the online deal prone segment, they can do so with not too much leakage to offline deal prone consumers.