Daily deal promotions: an explorative research on consumers' motivations in Italy

In the last months the real and the virtual world have been shattered by a spreading phenomenon: the daily deal promotions. Daily deal (dd) sites offer every day for a limited time to their subscribers, at a very discounted price, a deal for a product or a service. Although the first Groupon deal goes back to 2008, in the US, and the financial value of the company has skyrocketed since then, there is a lack of academic research on this topic. The aim of this paper is to present the results of an explorative research conducted on Italian dd shoppers to understand the motivations behind the success of the phenomenon. The authors conducted four synchronous online focus groups on 21 participants deep investigating five areas: level of awareness, perceptive area, social dimension, consumer behavior, and relationship with e-commerce. Some brand-new data helped in achieving another goal of this paper: finding out how dds fit into the more general frame of e-commerce worldwide and in Italy. Even if the results of a qualitative research cannot be generalized to the population, this study provides insights for dd sites and retailers to understand their customers’ shopping motivations, behaviors, and intentions.