The following is an excerpt from an article that Jack Aaronson wrote in which he touches on the topic he calls "Pavlovian Marketing".
I included this piece simply because it's a very interesting comparison to Broadway marketing tendencies. You can draw your own conclusions after reading.
"Pavlovian marketing stems from the idea you train users to only shop with you when they know they'll receive a discount. At a recent Shop.org retailer meeting I keynoted, several retailers told me they're afraid to do any promotions on a regular schedule. Profit margins decline while their customers wait for these coupons before buying.
The science goes back to Ivan Pavlov, but those who followed in his footsteps make the science important to this discussion. Pavlov demonstrated that dogs (and other animals) can be trained to respond a certain way to stimulation. Pavlov trained the dogs to salivate when they heard a bell because during training, the bell was always accompanied by food.
Pavlov's followers furthered his research and showed certain behaviors can become so conditioned they occur only when the stimulation occurs. In other words, the dogs could be trained to salivate only at the sound of a bell.
These findings greatly affect marketers. When we constantly give out coupons, not only do we provide a stimulus for buying, we also actively train customers to buy from us when they get coupons. Some may argue this is the point of coupons, but there's a secondary effect. If the coupons occur on a continuous reward schedule, we train people to shop only when they get a coupon. This can be disastrous for sales margins, as well as for brands."
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