The Impact of Free Experience on Consumers' Purchasing-A Study Based on the Reciprocity Theory

Product experience refers to a marketing tool to stimulate consumer purchase, which makes consumer cognize the quality and characteristics of goods by watching, listening, and tasting. The current studies only focus on the goods that consumers experience but ignore the interaction between the sellers and consumers during the process of free experience. This study attempts to design the new products experiences based on reciprocity theory and prospect theory. The authors examine the impact of gifts on purchase of customer in a longitudinal field experiment In the first study, we set two groups, one of which receive free experience and the other group does not, and observe the change in their purchasing. The result shows that the participants who received free products for experience purchased significantly more than those who did not. In the second study, we manipulated several factors within the gift treatment: the sequence of gift value, which improved, or worsened. A highly detrimental effect of decreasing value occurred on total purchase volume. The contribution of our study is integrating mental factor into economic benefit in product experience and customer relationship management, on the other hand, supporting Reciprocity and Prospective theory by the evidence from real business world. Management advices are proposed in order to enrich marketing theory and tools and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of marketing.