You’ve probably seen the TV shows about people who love coupons. I’m not one of the extreme types, but I like to save money as much as the next person and based on what I see at the grocery store, I’m not alone. That’s why I read an article about coupon usage this morning with great interest. One would think that given the challenging economic times that coupons would be pretty popular and one would be correct. That said, as I read the article, it seemed as if there is a huge opportunity being missed here. Let’s see what you think.The study was conducted by NCH Marketing and reported in the Research Brief blog. It found:
$470 billion of coupon value was offered by consumer package goods (CPG) marketers to U.S. consumers last year, a 26% increase over the pre-recession period of 2007. Value-conscious shoppers responded by redeeming $4.6 billion in savings, an increase of 12.2% over the year prior, and 58.6% higher than five years ago. During 2011, 3.5 billion coupons were redeemed, up 6.1% from 2010, and 34.6% since 2007.
Nice growth. But it was whilst reading the data about delivery that I scratched my head:
Digital coupons, as the newest media choice for marketers to reach consumers, grew with 11% more print-at-home and paperless offers distributed and tracked on NCH’s database. According to the NCH Consumer Survey, 64% regularly search the Internet for coupon savings on CPG products, up 13.5 share points
from a year ago. However, the total quantity of digital coupons don’t yet exceed 1% of all coupons distributed in the United States.
Huh? Given the explosion of mobile and that I keep bumping into people (literally) in the supermarket who have their heads down while they’re checking their phones, how is mobile delivery not a big thing? Much as the airlines have done with boarding passes, it would be pretty simple to deliver a code to an app on a smart phone and I know there are companies in the business. But with almost 90% of coupons still being delivered via Free Standing Inserts (those things you get with the newspaper) and the general decline of newspaper circulation (at least physical newspapers), marketers should be pushing to use alternative channels that better align with their customers.
I use apps from GroupOn or Living Social to redeem their offers and I’d be happy to go to the store with a loaded phone instead of a dozen slips of paper. That system gives me more immediate discounts and gives the marketers much better information. Since the supermarket already knows what I’m buying and when I use coupons (the value exchange for giving me loyalty discounts), maybe the resistance is in some of that data shifting. I don’t know. In any event, it’s a big opportunity being missed by an antiquated system. Right?
Consult Keith 