Retail price promotion and regular price purchases: a replication

Abstract

An often voiced concern of business practitioners relates to the value of academic research to their enterprise operations. The purpose of our research is to analyze a specific academic article that purports to provide retailers with insights as to the sales impact of pricing promotions and regular priced merchandise.(Mulhern and Padgett, Journal of Marketing, October, 1995). We replicated and extended the original study to test for possible effects of survey question positioning. The data was collected with the cooperation of a large Canadian Hardware store, and although this is a work in progress, the preliminary findings indicate the possibility of question positioning affecting the data collected. A further contribution of our research is to demonstrate the belief that a healthy scepticism of recommendations found in published academic research can be lessened through the use of replication and extension research.