Trust Worthiness of Promotional Schemes W.R.T Customers’ Perception: An Empirical Study in the Context of UAE

Abstract

Current marketing strategies have always aimed at understanding the consumer decision making style based upon the marketers’ perception. However, there exists a research gap to understand the trustworthiness and role of promotional schemes and its contribution from the customers’ point of view. This research study aims to fill that important gap and enable the marketers’ to make informed decisions about their customers.Irrespective of the recession and downturn in the market, the businesses and trading activities across the countries are enhanced because of changing life styles, culture, income, technology and employment opportunities etc. Especially, in the retail markets in UAE are heavily crowded throughout the year given that the habitual of shopping becomes customary and passion. And in UAE, the most of the population belongs to the category of expatriates and it’s inevitable to substantial shopping at least whenever they make visit to their home country. The marketers’ major way of promoting the goods and services, always through promotional schemes, specifically: the heavy discounts, offers and sweepstakes etc. Hence the current study focuses on the customer’s opinion towards promotional activities offered by marketers in UAE as a primary objective. The select product/service category was analyzed with descriptive statistical tools. The methodology includes the sample size of 250 respondents from UAE by deploying convenience sampling method. In-depth interview technique is also used to collect the primary data. For analyzing the data, necessary statistical tools like correlation, chi square, ranking method and factor analysis are used. Based on the findings of the study, essential suggestions were made at the end to improvise the marketer’s approach that leads to win –win situation for the both marketers and customer satisfaction. This particular study, definitely contributing insight into the literature of marketing domain and there is a potential for further research in these areas.

Keywords: Consumer, Behavior, Perception, Promotional schemes.