Looking forward, looking back: The impact of goal progress and time urgency on consumer responses to mobile reward apps

The authors conduct two studies to examine how time urgency affects consumer responses to mobile reward apps. For participants who have made high progress toward reaching goals, short expiration dates (“collect 10 stamps for a free coffee by tomorrow”) cause to-go framing (”2 more stamps to go”) to be more effective than to-date framing (”8 stamps collected so far”), but for participants who have a long way to go before reaching the goal, short expiration dates cause to-date framing to be more effective than to-go framing. However, a long expiration date produced no difference between to-go and to-date framings, under both high and low progress.