Happy 'half' birthday!

Recently, Prezzo sent me an email wishing me a happy ‘half’ birthday (I didn’t realise that was a thing), and offered me a free bottle of prosecco to celebrate. The only catch is that your bill must come to a minimum of £25, which is very likely to happen if you go with someone else- this offer seems too good to be true! There are a few reasons as to why this is persuasive:

·      Scarcity

Scarcity has been shown to be effective (Aggarwal, Jun & Huh, 2011). With this example, Prezzo use limited-time scarcity. The offer only lasts for 6 weeks, so people will be encouraged to use it quickly as they won’t want to forget about it.

·      Foot in the door

The idea of ‘foot in the door’ was proposed by Freedman & Fraser (1966) who found that when people were asked to put a sign reading ‘drive carefully’ in their window, they were more likely to if they had previously signed a petition for safe driving. In this situation, once people have committed to using this voucher and getting their free bottle of prosecco, they will be much more likely to spend more in the restaurant.

References

Aggarwal, P., Jun, S. Y., & Huh, J. H. (2011). Scarcity messages. Journal of Advertising, 40(3), 19-30.

Freedman, J. L., & Fraser, S. C. (1966). Compliance without pressure: the foot-in-the-door technique. Journal of personality and social psychology, 4(2), 195.