Promotional Campaign Duration and Word-of-Mouth in Durable Good Adoption

Abstract

Intensive promotional marketing campaigns can be used to introduce products to consumers with the goal of increasing awareness, consideration, purchase, and word-of-mouth (WOM). In this paper, we study the role of campaign duration on solar photovoltaic adoption using a large-scale field experiment, in which we randomly assign communities to campaigns with shorter durations, increasing the marketing intensity to maintain the same total resources per campaign. In our context, a nonprofit partner conducts the campaign in cooperation with an installer selected by the community. We combine detailed campaign information with administrative data on solar adoptions and a large-scale survey of adopters to assess the effect of campaign duration on the number of campaign events, prices paid, product adoption, and potential determinants of adoption during the campaign. We find that shortening the length of the campaign did not affect installer behavior, price, or product adoption during the campaign but led to significantly fewer leads and less WOM, resulting in significantly lower post-campaign adoption rates.