When a retailer wants to sell something, the instinct is to make things as easy as possible. Slash the price and apply it automatically. Zero friction, maximum convenience. But new research from Michael G. Foster Endowed Professor of Marketing Nidhi Agrawal and colleagues suggests that removing every last trace of effort from the checkout experience may sometimes be leaving sales on the table.
The study, published in the Journal of Marketing Research, introduces what the researchers call the “token-effort effect”: when shoppers are asked to take a tiny action to claim a discount — entering a promo code, solving a CAPTCHA — they redeem that discount at higher rates than when the same discount is applied automatically. The key is that the effort must remain trivial, not burdensome.
“The answer to optimizing is not always zero effort,” Agrawal says. “We should think about optimizing for a target audience — and explore possibilities of barriers that make things more engaging, especially at low levels of effort.”
A counterintuitive finding
Conventional wisdom and most of the existing marketing literature treat consumer effort as a cost: something to be minimized. Roughly 80 percent of people surveyed as part of the research predicted that an automatic discount would be more effective than a promo-code discount. They were wrong.
Agrawal and her co-authors ran eight studies, including two field experiments with Zoka Coffee, a Seattle-based roastery whose owner, Jeff Babcock, and Director of Marketing, Lisa Dahlby-Freeburg, are both Foster alumni. Zoka sent different versions of a promotional email to active online customers: One group received an automatic 15% discount on a new coffee, while the other had to enter a promo code to claim the same deal. The promo code group converted at a meaningfully higher rate. A second field test using social ads found a similar pattern: The promo-code version generated a higher unique click-through rate than the automatic-discount version.
“This is simply a small tweak to whatever you’re doing currently,” Agrawal says. “And if it increases even your slight response rate, that’s still a win for your business.”
Why a little effort pays off
Establishing that the effect was real was only the first puzzle. Understanding why it happened required the kind of collaborative back-and-forth Agrawal finds most energizing about research, with each co-author bringing a different methodological lens, proposing alternative explanations, and designing studies to rule them out.
“My favorite part of the collaborative research experience is that even after you’ve identified some phenomenon, you spend time thinking about: Why is this happening?” she says. “That’s the real intellectual depth problem-solving piece.”
The answer the team landed on runs through something they call perceived return on effort. When shoppers have to do something — even something trivial — to get a deal, two things happen. First, they feel personally responsible for obtaining the discount. Second, because the effort was so small and the reward is tangible, they perceive the return on that effort as high. That feeling translates into a kind of “smart shopper” satisfaction: I did something, and I got something for it.
“It’s not really making a calculation,” Agrawal explains. “It’s kind of like this fuzzy sense of: feels like I did something to deserve this.”
That warm feeling disappeared when shoppers were prompted to scrutinize the actual price tag. When researchers redirected shoppers’ attention to the purchase’s financial cost, asking them to reflect on how it would feel to spend that much money, the promo-code advantage vanished.
“The answer to optimizing is not always zero effort.” That’s the surprising research conclusion from Nidhi Agrawal, who found that a tiny amount of effort can sometimes make consumers value a reward more, not less.
Token, not burdensome
In the studies, the effect held when the effort was genuinely trivial — and disappeared when the task became burdensome. When researchers required shoppers to solve 20 CAPTCHAs instead of one, redemption rates dropped back to levels no better than an automatic discount. The principle, Agrawal says, is that the effort itself should be almost effortless — its value is symbolic, not substantive.
“The reason we call it ‘token’ is that it is literally the most minimal effort you can build in that still feels like you have to contribute something,” she says. “If you find yourself debating whether this is too much work, it is too much.”
That distinction sets the token-effort effect apart from better-known phenomena like the IKEA effect, where putting in real effort to build something makes you value it more. Entering a promo code doesn’t require skill, patience, or creativity. Anyone can do it. Yet the psychological benefit still registers.
From research to the Foster School of Business classroom
For Agrawal, the finding fits naturally into several classroom conversations: pricing strategy, consumer psychology, and especially the moments when students are thinking about how to design consumer experiences. Agrawal teaches an undergraduate course in consumer behavior and a doctoral seminar on theory building in consumer research.
“If we think about effort as just more or less, then we’ve kind of lost the psychological richness of the phenomenon,” she says. “We should think about effort as its meaning. And sometimes effort’s meaning is token. Sometimes it’s: whoa, almost no effort, easy, like in our token effort effect. And sometimes it’s: I did this, it was tough, and it meant something, like the IKEA effect.”
It’s a framework with implications for how businesses structure loyalty programs, onboarding experiences, and anywhere else consumers have to do something to get something back.
Where NIDHI Agrawal’s research goes next
Agrawal is now asking whether the token-effort principle might travel beyond pricing — into health behavior, another area her research has long explored. Could asking people to take a small action before accessing a wellness program increase their follow-through? Could a moment of deliberate friction slow down certain unhealthy decisions?
“Does token effort stop us, or does token effort propel us forward — like it does with coupons?” she asks. “I’ve been thinking about it in terms of impulse control.”
It’s the kind of question that captures what draws her to marketing research in the first place: finding places where human psychology is more interesting, and more surprising, than anyone expected, and yet shapes everyday consumer experiences.
“Human beings are so interesting,” she says. “The part about marketing, and bringing research to marketing, is to bring this very nerdy side to this very fun puzzle-solving collaborative process.”
Read the research: The Token-Effort Effect: Trivial Redemption Effort Increases Price Promotion Effectiveness — Kuangjie Zhang, Thomas Allard, Nidhi Agrawal, and Rajesh Bagchi. Published in Journal of Marketing Research (2025).
Nidhi Agrawal is the Michael G. Foster Endowed Professor of Marketing at the Foster School of Business.