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Offering a free gift when a purchase is made is one of the most pervasive marketing practices. We investigated whether making the product offered as a free gift also available for sale by itself (i.e., a stand-alone sale of the gift product) accentuated the customer's perception of the value of the promotion. Previous research on value anchoring and adjustment predicted that a stand-alone sale of a gift would increase the promotion value, whereas the opposite was predicted in the scarcity perception literature. We conducted 3 empirical studies with 330 undergraduate students in Korea, and the results supported the scarcity hypothesis: The availability of a stand-alone sale decreased the perceived scarcity of a free gift which, in turn, reduced the value of the promotional offer and discouraged our participants from joining the promotion program. Our findings suggest that the effectiveness of a free gift promotion is enhanced when the gift is not available as a stand-alone product.

Although men typically hold favorable views of advertisements featuring female sexuality, from a Terror Management Theory perspective, this should be less the case when thoughts of human mortality are salient. Two experiments conducted in South Korea supported this hypothesis across a variety of products (e.g., perfume and vodka). Men became more negative towards advertisements featuring female sexuality, and had reduced purchase intentions for those products, after thinking about their own mortality. Study 2 found that these effects were mediated by heightened disgust. Mortality thoughts did not impact women in either study. These findings uniquely demonstrate that thoughts of death interact with female sex-appeal to influence men’s consumer choices, and that disgust mediates these processes. Implications for the role of emotion, and cultural differences, in terror management, for attitudes toward female sexuality, and for marketing strategies are discussed.

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