Promotional Games: Trick or Treat?

Some marketers use game settings to offer deals. Though research has studied the conditions under which consumers engage in such games, we know little about how they respond to deal offers won through the gaming process. We hypothesize that when faced with deal offers from games, such as scratch cards or trivia quizzes, consumers who are high (vs. low) in choice freedom needs often feel reactance and reject the offer. We find converging evidence for this prediction in both controlled experiments (studies 1 and 3) and in a field study (study 2), when using ethnic backgrounds as a proxy for participants’ choice freedom needs (study 1), when directly measuring these needs (study 2), and when manipulating beliefs about the importance of free choice (study 3).