Role of group cohesiveness in targeted mobile promotions

While past research has explored the effects of different targeted promotion strategies (e.g., temporal, geographical, crowdedness-based), it is yet to take into account the effect of social context (e.g., group cohesiveness) on consumer responses to such promotions. We develop a metric for measuring tie-strengths between individuals in a co-located group and compute a holistic measure, group cohesiveness, from longitudinal physical location data. We deploy this new metric in a field experiment to explore the effect of group cohesiveness (high vs. low) on consumer responses to mobile promotions of varying lead-times. Across all our studies, we demonstrate that shorter promotion lead-times are preferred more by individuals in the presence of high cohesive groups (versus low cohesive groups). Thus, marketers should take advantage of social context attributes (such as group cohesiveness), which can be derived from ubiquitous location tracking data to tailor their promotion based on consumers’ real-time activities.